After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
It’s hard to remember how to spell the names of some cities. Tallahassee, Florida, for example. Then there are towns with very few letters to remember. Y, a tiny town in northern France, has only two main streets, which come together to form...
How do you pronounce the name of the state Nevada? Steven, a Nevada native now living in Baltimore, Maryland, says he’s forever encountering people who pronounce the name of his home state incorrectly, with an ah sound in the middle. The a in...
Book recommendation time! Martha’s reading Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows, short stories based on example sentences from dictionaries, and Grant recommends Julia Durango’s The Leveler, a techno-thriller for teens about virtual worlds...
If you pronounce short-lived with a long i, you’re saying it correctly– at least by the standards of the 1600’s. Today it’s far more commonly pronounced with a short i, though both pronunciations are acceptable. This is part...
Although a few sticklers cling to the traditional pronunciation of short-lived with a long i, the vast majority of Americans now pronounce short-lived with a short i. Long live the latter, we say. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...