They say it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an autocorrected text message to be, well, correct. Listeners like Arnold share their funny autocorrected text messages. And by Arnold, we of course mean Brooke...
What does hoot mean? You might describe someone as a real hoot. But is the hoot in the phrase “not give a hoot” a different kind of hoot? Grant explains that in the positive case, hoot is a shortening of hootenanny, a informal party with...
Grant and Martha talk about new and unusual language. If something has you puzzled or mystified, you’re metagrobolized. If you’re speaking voice sounds like grunting, you’re said to be gruntulous. And what does spox mean...
Some foreign idioms involving color have been adopted whole into English. A case in point: French bête noire. Literally, it means “black beast,” and it’s used figuratively now in English to mean anything particularly disliked or...
Does sanction mean “a penalty” or “an approval”? Well, both. Martha explains the nature of contranyms, also known as Janus words. Here’s an article about them in the periodical Verbatim. This is part of a complete...
A Marine stationed in California says that growing up in North Carolina, he understood the expression fixin’ to or fixing to to mean “to be about to.” This is part of a complete episode.