Peter, calling from the coastal town of La Jolla, California, asks for a word for the bright pools of silver light that form on the ocean when sunbeams poke through cloud cover. Albedo describes the proportion of light a surface reflects, and...
flipping n.— «Those wetlands that remained were often tracts of infertile, troublesome land such as the West Coast pakihi swamps. Yet today even these are under pressure. Mechanical diggers are now used to smash the buried, impervious...
A woman from Cape Cod is looking for a polite word that means the current wife of my ex-husband. She’s thinking about cur-wife, but somehow that doesn’t quite work. Neither does the phrase “that poor woman.” The hosts try to...
A listener in Brazil challenges Martha’s pronunciation of the odd English word antipodes. Their email exchange leads Martha to muse about a favorite collection of poems, where she first encountered this word.
lukewarmer n.— «I make no claim (or suggestion) that greenhouse warming isn’t the driver behind global warming over the last three decades. I simply don’t know. (Also, I am a “lukewarmer” who thinks that the world is warmer than it would...
daylighting n.— «Yet until a decade ago the river was buried beneath a busy boulevard filled with cars and trucks. Looking for a way to beautify and enliven their city center, citizens of Aarhus decided to liberate the river from the...