Cara in San Diego, California, wonders why English has monologue and dialogue, but unicycle and bicycle rather than monocycle and dicycle. The dia- in dialogue means “through,” as in diagonal and diameter, not “two,” and duologue is the term for a...
Some 50 years ago, says Susan from Burbank, California, she and a friend made up a game involving prefixes and suffixes, which led to such nonsense words as epidormithry and postpreparize. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Nathan, a sailor at the United States Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, reports a vigorous dispute among his fellow servicemembers: Is gruntled a word? Nathan feels gruntled must be a word, arguing that it’s clearly the opposite of disgruntled. But...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle requires misreading words that begin with the letters P-R-E. For example, the word preaching could be misread as having to do with “hurting beforehand” — that is, pre-aching. This is part of a...
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...
A Marietta, Georgia, listener says her high school English teacher challenged her to find words that start with un- or in- that mean the same thing with or without the prefix. The list includes ravel and unravel, flammable and inflammable, loosen...
