Olivia, a sixth-grader in Somerville, New Jersey, says she and her classmates were flummoxed by a word on their spelling-bee study list: xylyl. It’s a term from chemistry, referring to a group of atoms derived from a liquid called xylene. One...
Olivia from Denver, Colorado, is musing about her use of the term good people, as in She’s good people. This phrase is what linguists call an extragrammatical idiom, meaning the phrase makes sense even though it’s not grammatically...
Does speaking a particular language make you feel certain emotions? The hosts talk about a blog post by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson musing about whether this might be true. This is part of a complete episode.