Jack from Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, reports that in his part of the world, people sometimes inquire about a person’s last name with a question that combines the person’s first name with the phrase How Much, as in Jack How Much? This...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski is a fan of fan names — those nicknames given to devotees of a particular show or performer — so much so that he’s collected a whole puzzleful of them. Justin Bieber fans, for example, are known as Beliebers, so what do...
Our conversation about women who use the nicknames Gertie or Gert as jokingly affectionate terms for each other, prompted a listener in Melbourne, Australia, to speculate that it’s a nod to Gertrude Lawrence, an English performer who rose to...
A listener shares a story about how she went from hating the nickname her grandmother bestowed on her to regarding it with fondness many years later. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Learning to Love a Nickname”...
It’s far less common for women in the United States to name their daughters after themselves, but it has been done. Eleanor Roosevelt, for one, is actually Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Jr. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
It’s the Up Goer Five Challenge! Try to describe something complex using only the thousand most common words in English. It’s a useful mental exercise that’s harder than you might think. Also, if you want to make a room dark, you...