A listener remembers her grandmother’s colorful comment when someone arrived late after getting lost: You went around your elbow to get to your thumb. Lots of similar sayings in English suggest roundabout routes or overcomplicated tasks, including...
Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...
Ben calls from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to say that he and his wife, who is from Germany, were taking a leisurely stroll at Valley Forge. They ended up leaving one of the trails and taking a diagonal route across a field and agreed that in...
Responding to our chat about tchotchkes, or “knick knacks,” a listener says they have heard such trinkets called piff-paff in England. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Piff-Paff” We got an email from Whitney Quisenberry, who was...
Mark from Chicago, Illinois, wonders: Why do some people use the term backslash to refer to a forward slash when giving a website address? Terms for that mark in other contexts are virgule, from the Latin for “twig,” and solidus. This is part of a...
The early 20th-century Spanish poet Antonio Machado has a beautiful poem about finding one’s way. The translation in this segment is by Anna Rosenwong and María José Giménez. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Antonio Machado Poem”...
