In this week’s episode: Just how far back could you go and still understand the English people were speaking? We crank up our trusty time machine to find out. Hint: You’d probably have a tough time getting around in the eighth century...
Barack Obama wants to put people to work building roads and bridges. But how about a federal jobs program for out-of-work writers? Also: why do we call it a flight of wine? How did the haircut called a mullet get its name?
This past weekend on "A Way with Words," we mulled over whether part of the recession-busting bailouts the government is proposing should be targeted at reviving the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s. Get a taste of that, and...
Amelia in Logan, Utah wondered whether her family’s Thanksgiving meal, served from a kitchen island, was buffet style or smorgasbord style. In everyday American English, a smorgasbord is essentially a kind of buffet, a spread of small dishes that...
distavore n.— «To prove how wrong the farm-to-table movement is, I cooked a dinner purely of farm-to-airplane food. Nothing I made was grown within 3,000 miles of where I live in Los Angeles.…My distavore meal was more a smorgasbord...
On an earlier episode we talked about regional differences involving the words dinner and supper, prompting a whole smorgasbord of responses. Grant reads a few of them on the air. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Dinner and...