It takes some work for a writer to go all-city— a graffiti writer, that is. An art supplies dealer from Dallas shares some vocabulary from the world of street art. For example, the old act of photographing trains from benches gave birth to the term...
New York seems to have a doguero on every street corner. Grant shares this Spanglish term for “a hot dog vendor.” This is part of a complete episode.
Did you say “shtreet”? The str sound is becoming shtr in the mouths of English speakers. Grant explains that this pronunciation of “street” as “shtreet” is simply a feature of language — sort of the consonant...
A listener wonders why his girlfriend remarks “hubba-hubba” when he’s dressing up for the night. The flirty call had its heyday in the 1940s, when World War II soldiers would see a pretty lady walking down the street. Although no...
Stories From The Onion In this week’s episode, Martha and Grant discuss not-to-be-believed articles about language from the satirical newspaper The Onion, including one headlined “Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from...
Martha talks about the hoopoe, that colorful, clownish, extremely smelly bird—with a likely linguistic connection to defrauded hedge fund investors.
