Are your nightstand books all over the place? Why not stack ’em into a bookmash? A bookmash is a kind of found poetry formed from book titles! And we all know that honesty is the best policy. But does that mean you should correct the grammar of your...
Do Americans use the same sign language as the British? And what do Japanese people use instead of umm? Plus, why do we vote at polling places? What goes into file 13? All this, a word quiz, commode vs. toilet, saditty and bougie, and cute stuff...
Regional grammar can be just as rich and diverse as regional vocabulary. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project maps grammatical features that vary across American English, using research and survey data to show where they cluster. Examples include...
If you say to someone the Spanish equivalent of “you’re giving me green gray hairs” (me sacas canas verdes), it means that person is making you angry. In Japan, the phrase that literally translates as “one red dot”...
Thunder and lightning! It's another email newsletter from "A Way with Words," where we put the "recess" in "recession." In our latest broadcast we talked about "fankle," baby platypuses (as they say at...
Here’s a riddle: “Nature requires five, custom gives seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven.” Think you know the answer? You’ll find it in this week’s episode, in which Grant and Martha discuss this and other...
