Among London cabbies, a musher is somebody who owns their own cab, a starving musher is someone still paying for their cab, and musher’s lotion is rain. The book Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages (Bookshop|Amazon), writer Ben...
What’s the word for the smell of rain? It’s petrichor. For years, scientists referred to this evidence of rain as argillaceous odor because it was particularly noticeable near soil with a lot of whitish clay called argil. Then, in the early 1960s...
Martha reads Jessica Goodfellow’s poem about the sound of water, “Chance of Precipitation,” which first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “”Chance of Precipitation”” You’re listening to A Way...
It’s hard enough to get a new word into the dictionary. But what happens when lawmakers get involved? New Jersey legislators passed a resolution as part of an anti-bullying campaign urging dictionary companies to adopt the word upstander. It means...
A listener from California says her family’s way of remarking on rain is to mention the space between falling drops. So a 12-inch rain means there’s about a foot between one drop and the next. Tricky, huh? This is part of a complete episode...
Insensible losses, in the world of medicine, are things your body loses which you simply don’t sense. A prime example is the water vapor you see coming out of your body when you exhale in cold weather, but aren’t aware of when it’s warmer out. This...