There are word nerds, and then there’s the woman who set up a folding chair on sidewalks throughout the country, cheerfully dispensing tips about grammar. She recounts her adventures in a new book. And the story of the brilliant pioneer of...
A listener shares a funny childhood misunderstanding: Her four-year-old kept referring to something in the have-in-it. It took a while before she realized the word he meant was cabinet. The family got such a kick out of the boy’s logic that...
An industrial-design student in Savannah, Georgia, uses Boolean software for making 3-D renderings. Why Boolean ? The term honors the brilliant autodidact George Boole, who helped pioneer the use of binary computing language and Boolean logic. This...
Sir Paul McCartney once wrote a song that included the phrase female pulchritude and luminosity. The word pulchritude means “beauty,” but why such an ugly-sounding word for such a lovely thing? Pulchritude derives from pulcher, a Latin word meaning...
What’s the first really big word you remember learning? For one listener, the word was conflagration. For Martha, it was logical, a word she repeated after watching “Sylvester the Cat” cartoons, followed in short order by...
The slang expression “No Tea, No Shade,” meaning “No disrespect, but …” is common in the drag community, where T means “truth.” The related phrase “All Tea, All Shade,” means “This statement is...