Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...
The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (Bookshop|Amazon) by Patrik Svensson, translated by Agnes Broome won Sweden’s highest literary prize. Although Svensson himself has described...
The first-ever “Word by Word” awards were presented by A Way With Words co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett as part of a sold-out celebration at the San Diego Natural History Museum. To celebrate its tenth year of independent production...
First-century graffiti. People in ancient times could be just as bawdy and colorful as we are today. To prove it, we found some graffiti written on the walls in the city of Pompeii, and found plenty of sex, arrogance and good old fashioned bathroom...
Is that a winklehawk in your pants? A listener shares this word for those L-shaped rips in your trousers, from an old Dutch term for “a carpenter’s L-shaped tool.” And Grant has a new favorite term, motherwit, meaning “the...
For tech-savvy types, saying “ping me,” meaning “contact me,” is as natural as grabbing a snack while waiting for your computer to boot up. The hosts disagree about whether the verb ping has already moved into common parlance...