It’s an easy way to separate New Yorkers from non-New Yorkers: Do you stand on line or in line? A Midwesterner who relocated to the Big Apple wants to know why people there are adamant about waiting on line instead of in line. See a map...
Ahoy, mateys! You've received another newsletter from "A Way with Words," which, like a walk around the promenade deck, is known to relieve uncomfortable internal distress. What do children call their grandparents? What is a...
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.
If English isn’t your first language, there are lots of ways to learn it, such as memorizing Barack Obama’s speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention. Martha and Grant talk about some of the unusual ways foreigners are learning to speak...
beat sweetener n.— «The New Yorker says White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is “a political John McEnroe, known for both his mercurial temperament and his tactical brilliance,” yet is also uncommonly indifferent to both...
Beddian year n.— «Shearer chatted with another firefighter, Bobby Beddia. Shearer said recently, “He mentioned that he was very lucky, because he was fifty-three, so this year he got to experience living in his ’birth year...