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. Transcript of “Doguero” Here in San Diego, we often find that Spanish and...
James, an art-supplies dealer in Dallas, shares street-art vocabulary from graffiti culture. A writer is someone who does graffiti, and bombing usually refers to doing illegal graffiti rather than a legal mural, with a finished piece sometimes...
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 one’s sure of the...
Ron in Escondido asks why street sometimes sounds like shtreet. English speakers around the world have noticed str shifting toward shtr for decades, in words such as street and straight. The likely mechanism is assimilation, in which neighboring...
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.