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Are fairy tales too scary for children? A survey of parents in Britain found that more than half wouldn’t read them to their children before age five. Martha and Grant discuss the grisly imagery in fairy tales, and whether they’re too...
Memorial Day good wishes to you and the remembered. Here's another newsletter from "A Way with Words." Did you miss us? There was no newsletter last week, so now we have two brand-spanking-new episodes to share. This past...
Hey, hey, hey! It's another fat newsletter from "A Way with Words"! We never run out of things to talk about. Take this past weekend's show, for example. We tracked down the history of "Polly wanna cracker." It turns out...
file carving n.— «It is an example of a sophisticated technique called file carving—restoring the contents of a file after the identifying information that accompanies it has been removed or lost.» —“Sleuthing Software Can Reassemble...
For a closer look at the language of the twitterati, check out Erin McKean’s recent piece in the Boston Globe. Glossaries of Twitter-related terms can be found at Twittonary, and Twictionary. We didn’t say all the coinages were clever...
Beep-boop-beep! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words." This weekend we had a row over the death of the subjunctive, listened with curiosity to a Texan talking about "help your plate," fell in love with...