Need a book to lift you out of this world? Try Orbital (Bookshop|Amazon). In it, Booker-winning novelist Samantha Harvey imagines the moment-to-moment experience of living on a space station, a mixture of the mundane and the majestic, 250 miles...
To grok something means “to understand it completely.” The word grok comes from a language spoken on the planet Mars—well, at least according to the science fiction writer who coined the term! Also, we know the meaning of the word...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
In Cockney rhyming slang, apples and pears is a synonym for “stairs,” and dustbin lids means kids. Plus, sniglets are clever coinages for things we don’t already have words for. Any guesses what incogsneeto means? It’s the...
Say you’re on a long road trip. Do you have a term for another driver who happens to be traveling the same direction and sets the pace for your car mile after mile? In an earlier episode, a Rhode Island listener left us wondering why her Swedish...
The new online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a comprehensive, quotation-based online resource that’s a delight for language lovers of all kinds, and a treasure trove for sci-fi fans. It’s the work of lexicographer Jesse...