If you’re tired of saying It’s hot outside, you always say It’s glorgy, pronounced with hard g sounds. This Scottish word may derive from an old word meaning “soft mud.” You could also say the weather is pothery, an...
Eileen remembers a nursing-home resident who liked her tea barefoot, meaning without milk or sugar. The slang use goes back at least to the mid-19th century and can also describe plain coffee or liquor taken straight, with evidence from English...
A woman in Monkton, Vermont, says that when she and her 91-year-old mother return from a leisurely drive, her mother will proclaim, “That was a nice ride around the gool.” The phrase going around the gool appears in the Dictionary of American...
A listener in Port Washington, Wisconsin, asks: When is it appropriate to get rid of an old edition of a dictionary? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Discarding and Replacing Dictionaries” Hi, you have A Way with Words...
Now that the Encyclopedia Britannica is going to an online-only format, one of many things we’ll miss is the accidental poetry on the books’ spines. In the age of endless digital information, volumes like Accounting-Architecture and...
For 341 years, the poets laureate of Britain have all been male. That just changed with the appointment of Britain’s new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has been described as “dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest...