Lady, woman, and girl carry different signals depending on speaker, listener, age, number, and setting. Rachel, a 22-year-old from upstate New York, heard a hostel roommate described as a lady and pictured someone older. Her Wisconsin friend meant...
If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...
What are you obligated to put into and leave out of a memoir? What kind of consequences should you expect if you’re completely honest about others in your life? Well-known writers, including Pat Conroy, Cheryl Strayed, Sue Monk Kidd, Anne...
A customer-service representative from Seattle, Washington, is curious about the phrases people use as a part of leave-taking when they’re finishing a telephone conversation. Linguists who conduct discourse analysis on such conversations say...
Marlene in Indianapolis grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula using pank to mean pat, tamp, or firm something down, from snow on a ski hill to teased hair before a blast of Aqua Net. The verb is especially associated with the Upper Peninsula of...
If you grew up reading Hardy Boys books, chances are you knew the term indicted long before you ever heard it pronounced. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Pronouncing “Indicted”” Grant, we were talking...
