Do you use paper towels or paper towelling? While a listener insists her husband’s wrong for his use of paper towelling, Grant explains how certain nouns take a gerund ending. For example, clothes derive from clothing, and the side of a house...
A few weeks ago, a listener was looking for a term to describe the copy of The Emperor’s New Clothes that he’d read many times as a child. In this picture book, the naughty bits were always cleverly covered up. Thinking he wanted a synonym for “fig...
After passing by an establishment featuring adult entertainment, an Asheville, N.C., man began wondering: When did the word adult come to refer to “material not suitable for children”? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
ghost shift n.— «Very low serial numbers, like very low MAC ID addresses, are a hallmark of the “ghost shift,” i.e. the shift that happens very late at night when a rogue worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off...
rehydroxylation dating n.— «Researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Edinburgh, behind the new technique, called it “rehydroxylation dating” to be used on fired clay ceramics like bricks, tile and pottery. […]...
recycled pulsar n.— «Astronomers have long theorized that these superfast stars share their orbit with a companion star from which they leech extra material. The material settles around the pulsar’s middle in a so-called accretion disk...