Salutations and welcome! If you missed the last weekend's thrilling episode of A Way with Words, you missed car chases, gunfights, and your co-hosts leaping from high-speed trains! Alas, no. But there was a lot of chatter about the Ig Nobel...
A electronic teenager repellent? An alarm clock that runs away from you to make you’ll wake up? Yep, it’s the Ig Nobel Prizes, those awards for academic research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. Martha and Grant honor this year’s...
Halloo and ahoy! If you missed last weekend's episode of A Way with Words, it's now up on the web site: We had a good time as we talked with callers about: --the meaning and origin of "snarky" --"last-stich effort" vs...
trick lit n.— «Trick Lit is the term for a chick lit novel that pretends to be something else, hoping to rope people in with an interesting premise. 30 pages later, you discover that you were deceived, that it’s just another piece of genre trash...
magical black man n.— «“Angel Levine” introduces us to another flying Jew, without feathers, this time simply black, a magical black man, Alexander Levine, by name, but by narrational locution, “the Negro.”…Where does such a magical black man come...
whimperative n.— «We shall not discuss here the complicated questions of implicit performatives, e.g., of so-called whimperatives, debated in the linguistic literature.» —“Directives, Norms, and Performatives” by K. Opalek Normative Structures of...