What’s the common bond that links the names Vanessa, Cedric, and Pamela? They’re all names coined by famous authors. Vanessa was invented by Jonathan Swift as a pet name for his lover Esther Van Homrigh.The 16th-century poetSir Phillip Sidney coined...
A Wisconsin listener says that when her body gets an involuntary, inexplicable shudder, she says “A goose walked over my grave.” An early version of the saying, “There’s somebody walking over my grave!” appears in a 1738 book by Jonathan Swift, A...
What happens when a clock gets hungry? It goes back four seconds. Martha talks about how puns weren’t always considered “bad.” Cicero praised them as the wittiest kind of saying, and Shakespeare made plenty of them, for both serious and comic effect...
Martha shares a couple of Tom Swifties, those funny sentences that make great punny use of adverbs, like “‘My bicycle wheel is damaged,’ Tom said outspokenly.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Bicycle Tom Swifty” A little later in...
