Being a writer and making a living as a writer are often two different things. Maybe you’re writing poetry at night but by day you’re writing technical manuals or web copy. Journalist Michael Erard, whose day job is writing for think...
Lock the bad guys up in the hoosegow! This slang term for a jail comes from the Spanish juzgado, meaning tribunal. It’s an etymological relative of the English words judge and judicial. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
This past weekend we aired one of our most popular episodes from last year, in which we talked about sailing close to the wind, the language of Downton Abbey, the color orange, busman’s holiday, the pronunciation of forte and more. Check it...
The hosts discuss Ammon Shea’s recent New York Times Magazine column about whether a large vocabulary filled with obscure and unusual words is all that necessary. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Large, Obscure...
Boom! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words." Get an earful of our conversation from this past week's show: pandiculation, doorknobbing, cotton-picking, enormity, on the QT, and more: Martha's got a foodie treat...
warehousing n.— «Keeping loans off the books of Anglo every year for eight years meant that the €87 million in loans did not emerge in the snapshot of the bank that the independent auditors, Ernst Young, take every year for the purposes...