Gifts for book lovers: Martha recommends one for lovers of libraries and another for students of Spanish. Grant suggests some enchanting novels for young readers. When it comes to books, though, you can’t always judge them by their original...
Diane in Midland, Texas, asks why so many English words beginning with sn, including sneer, snarl, snot, snide, and snooty, carry negative or nose-related meanings. Phonesthesia is the term for associating certain sounds with particular meanings. In...
A pint-sized mad scientist, a green-haired girl with a contagious sense of wonder, and a 10-year-old detective. They’re all characters in the books on Grant’s latest list of recommended books for children. Also, what’s the word for...
Among Grant’s word-of-the-year picks had to be Higgs boson, that fundamental particle of matter discovered by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Higgs Boson”...
Word birth is Deb Roy’s term for the moment a child’s babble sharpens into a recognizable word. To study it, the MIT cognitive scientist and his wife wired their home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones, plus a privacy button, and recorded their...
Hi, ho! In this week’s episode, we discuss odd words, how children learn to talk, “in my wheelhouse,” “high as Cooter Brown,” and “good leather.” Greg Pliska metagrobolizes us with a quiz based on the 2011...