Galen in White River, Arizona, asks: Is there really a “neutral” accent, and if so, what is it? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Is There Really a Neutral Accent?” Hi there, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Galen calling from...
When does a word’s past make it too sensitive to use in the present? In contra dancing, there’s a particular move that dancers traditionally call a gypsy. But there’s a growing recognition that many people find the term gypsy offensive. A group of...
To throw your hat into the room is to ascertain whether someone’s angry with you, perhaps stemming from the idea of tossing your hat in ahead of to see if someone shoots at it. Ronald Reagan used the expression this way when apologizing to Margaret...
The word fulsome has undergone some real semantic changes over the years. It used to mean “excessive, overly full” negatively, but it’s come to have positive connotations for some, who think it means “copious” or “abundant.” It’s a word that...
The idiom and the horse you rode in on, usually preceded by a far more unfriendly phrase, tends to be directed at someone who’s full of himself and unwelcome to boot. It first pops up in the 1950s, and it’s written on the spine of a book in Donald...
Yolani from San Diego grew up saying squoze as the past tense of squeeze, as in “I squoze some oranges,” and wants to know whether it’s a real word. The standard form for formal writing and speech is squeezed, but squoze has centuries of dialectal...
