Megan from East Hampton, New York, asks why an elementary school is sometimes called a grammar school when pupils study far more than grammar. The name reaches back to medieval church and monastery schools, or scolae grammaticales, where Latin...
If you’re looking for a clever way to straddle the glass-half-empty line, try using litotes, or understated slights turned positive. For example, the guy you met for a blind date was really not unattractive. This is part of a complete episode...
How about some wind pudding with a dollop of air sauce? What’s in a tavern sandwich? Do pregnant women really crave pickles and ice cream? Grant and Martha dig in to colorful language from the world of food. Plus, ever think of publishing a...
What happens when a clock gets hungry? It goes back four seconds. Martha talks about how puns weren’t always considered “bad.” Cicero praised them as the wittiest kind of saying, and Shakespeare made plenty of them, for both...
Martha and Grant discuss why some puns work and others don’t. Martha recommends John Pollack’s observation in The Pun Also Rises describing how “for a split second, puns manage to hold open the elevator doors of language and...
Antimetabole, from Greek words meaning “turning about in the opposite direction,” is the rhetorical turn in “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” where the same words come back in reverse order. Bascom in Redding, California, collects...