Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called “I Don’t Think So, M-W.” The name is a nod to Merriam-Webster’s word of the day email, which often uses puzzling example sentences, like this one: “Lying in my tent that night, I could hear the campfire...
Why do spelling bees in the United States use so many bizarre, obsolete, ginormous, and Brobdingnagian words? Webster’s New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, published in 1961, is still the standard for spelling bees, and thus contains some...
Hey, friends! This past weekend, we re-aired an episode you may have missed. Among other things, we talked anatomical eponyms in medicine, such as Achilles heel and fallopian tubes, which are being phased out; litotes, which use negatives to say...
It’s another A Way with Words newsletter! This past weekend’s episode was a rebroadcast, which we named “Pickles and Ice Cream.” English speakers use those two when they want to compare two things that don’t go well together. We also talked about:...
Ever eaten golden catheads for breakfast? Yum! A listener shares this Southern term for big, fluffy biscuits. Also, how did people greet each other before “hello” became a standard greeting of choice? What does it mean if someone’s fair to middling...
When it comes to language, a listener from Dallas wants to know, as a fellow Texan might put it, “who’s the decider”? Grant explains that nobody makes the rules about language, and everybody does. For those seeking professional guidance, a whole...