Hello! “A few pickles short of a jar,” “a few peas short of a casserole,” “two French fries short of a Happy Meal”—in this week’s archive episode, we talk about full-deckisms, those clever terms for someone...
Howdy, folks! You still have three days to win a brand-new “A Way with Words” iPod Shuffle stocked with our 10 favorite episodes of the show, plus room for much more. To be eligible, take the listener feedback survey: It takes just a...
What’s the possessive of y’all? Is it y’all’s? Y’alls? Y’alls’s? What do all ya’ll think?
Enough about the Word of the Year. How about the Word of the Decade? Bailout? Google? Martha and Grant discuss some candidates. Also in this episode, does speaking a different language make you feel different emotions? What did Don Draper on Mad Men...
A woman from Indianapolis is trying to convince her grandmother that it’s okay for restaurant servers to refer to both male and female customers as you guys. Grandma says it’s sexist. Our caller maintains it’s fine, drawing an...
A Pensacola man says he’s invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He’s not the first to try, as shown by linguist Dennis Baron’s chronology of failed attempts to create and popularize epicene...

