A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems...
We’ve talked before about how names of our pets often evolve over time. Cartoonist Scott Metzger captured this idea in a drawing of a Nickname Support Group for dogs and cats. This is part of a complete episode.
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...
Following our earlier conversation about nicknames, listeners are still responding with stories about their own nicknames. Two of those show how nicknames sometimes arise from a single incident, then stick around for years. In one story, a girl...
Lana in Evansville, Indiana, says all the women in her family affectionately call each other Gert or Gertie. She has discovered that one of her friends also uses the name Gertie as a term of endearment for the women in her own family. Although in...
The verb to eke, as in to eke out a living or eke out a win, derives from Old English eaca, meaning “addition” or “supplement.” The expression an eke name, or literally “an additional name” was later altered by...