Hi, all -- In this week's episode of "A Way with Words": If you want to make a room cooler, do you "turn up" the air conditioning? Or do you "turn it down"? Also, "croaker" meaning a "hundred-dollar...
When President Barack Obama had the Oval Office redecorated in soft browns and beige, The New York Times headline read: “The Audacity of Taupe.” The hosts discuss how puns work, and what makes them clever. Martha recommends John Pollack’s new book...
This week: whether cotton-pickin’ is racist, unintentionally funny headlines, whether enormity can simply mean “enormous,” how a person can be “such a pill,” and pandiculation. “It’s good stuff, Maynard!”
Quiz Guy John Chaneski sums up the events of 2009 in the form of limericks, all with a blank to be filled. Here’s one: NASA really put on a great show / A new lunar crater did blow / To the glee of mankind / The rocket did find / That the moon...
deather n.—Gloss: A person who believes that one or more of the current health care proposals being discussed in Washington D.C. includes a “death panel” that would allow doctors to counsel patients about ways to end their own lives. Note:...
For 341 years, the poets laureate of Britain have all been male. That just changed with the appointment of Britain’s new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has been described as “dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest minutiae of...