A man in Orlando, Florida, asks if there’s a word for slowly circling a parking lot in search of a space for your car. Slang terms for this include sharking and sharking for parking, and sometimes such drivers are jokingly called vultures...
Brand names, children’s games, and the etiquette of phone conversations. Those clever plastic PEZ dispensers come in all shapes and sizes—but where did the word PEZ come from? The popular candy’s name is the product of wordplay involving...
A rock or particle of debris out in space is called a meteoroid. If it enters the earth’s atmosphere, it’s a called meteor. So why is it called a meteorite when it falls to earth? This is part of a complete episode.
It’s hard enough to get a new word into the dictionary. But what happens when lawmakers get involved? New Jersey legislators passed a resolution as part of an anti-bullying campaign urging dictionary companies to adopt the word upstander. It...
A listener from California says her family’s way of remarking on rain is to mention the space between falling drops. So a 12-inch rain means there’s about a foot between one drop and the next. Tricky, huh? This is part of a complete episode.
The exhortation in Shakespeare’s Henry V, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” is now a part of common speech. But not every fan of the Bard knows what a breach is. It’s simply a gap—a space between two things. This is...
