The new Downton Abbey movie is a luscious treat for fans of the public-television period piece, but how accurate is the script when it comes to the vocabulary of the early 20th century? It may be jarring to hear the word swag, but it was already at...
Science historian Cecelia Watson’s splendid new book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark is her long love letter to an underappreciated punctuation mark. This is part of a complete episode.
An insurance fraud investigator in Milwaukee wonders if he’s correct to use a semicolon immediately after the word “however.” Grant suggests that the word and the punctuation mark should do a do-si-do. This is part of a complete...
Welcome to another edition of the A Way with Words newsletter. What was college slang like 100 years ago? That's what we talked about on the air this past weekend. We also talked about "go fly a kite," nicknames for Vancouver, and why...
Welcome to another newsletter from A Way with Words! This past weekend we listened to the episode which featured "layers for meddlers and crutches for lame ducks" and "you buy 'em books, you give 'em books, and all they do is...
Stand back! It's another newsletter from A Way with Words. This past weekend on A Way with Words we talked about crossword puzzles. This coming weekend superstar solvers from across the continent will gather in Brooklyn, New York, to test their...