If you’ve never dined on funistrada, braised trake, or buttered ermal, you’re not missing out, nor are you alone. All of those are made-up food names that were part of a 1972 survey given to thousands of members of the U.S. military to...
Answers to our online survey of some 2500 respondents suggest that some 10 percent of English speakers pronounce both as “bolth,” and there’s apparently no regional component to this pronunciation marked by what linguists call an...
Dan from Atlantic Beach, Florida, grew up in southwestern Ohio, where he and his friends and family referred to their neighborhoods as plats, as in “What plat do you live in?” To plat a place is jargon for the process of making a...
Benjamin in Seattle, Washington, says both with a brief L sound, like bolth, a pronunciation his partner noticed before he did. It’s not confined to Northern California, where he grew up, or to the Midwest connection she wondered about. In an online...
Bert Vaux, the linguist whose data was the basis of the wildly popular New York Times Dialect Quiz, is collecting more data about American English, and invites you to take a survey. The answers will help inform a new app he’s working on. This...
Help support A Way with Words broadcasts and podcasts by making a donation now. Dear friends, Last week we sent out a simple survey to tens of thousands of A Way with Words listeners and fans. Our goal: to find out your consensus on the state of the...