Grant shares some diabolically clever crossword clues. Have at ’em: Hula hoop? (3 letters). A city in Czechoslovakia? (Four letters). Want to try more? Check out the clues at Clever Clue of the Month and The New York Times Cute Clues. This is part...
Some teachers are using a controversial tactic to get young students reading: They let their pupils choose which books to read for class. Does it work? Also, should that line at the grocery store checkout read 15 items or less or fewer? And is the...
The 2010 winner of the “Best Picture” Oscar has a Seattle woman wondering about the term hurt locker. Ben Zimmer wrote about it recently in his column at the Visual Thesaurus and we talk about it, too. Here’s the searing poem by Brian Turner called...
The hosts discuss Ammon Shea’s recent New York Times Magazine column about whether a large vocabulary filled with obscure and unusual words is all that necessary. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Large, Obscure Vocabulary” You’re...
Martha shares the famous passage from the poem by Catullus that begins, “Give me a thousand kisses…“ Grant reads an excerpt from the 1883 volume, The Love Poems of Louis Barnaval by Charles de Kay. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
David Pogue, technology columnist for The New York Times, grapples with a slang quiz. First he shares own his favorite slang term, nonversation, then tries to guess the meaning of the archaic technological slang terms planktonocrit, phenakistoscope...
