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...
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...
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...
Some words and phrases you just love to hate: “Your call is important to us.” “Do I mind if I put you on hold?” And how about those annoying mid-dinner announcements like “This is a courtesy call”? Martha and...
Does speaking a particular language make you feel certain emotions? The hosts talk about a blog post by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson musing about whether this might be true. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Language...
Tui from Fort Worth, Texas, wonders how to say gyro, the meat-and-pita sandwich. The Oxford English Dictionary records four pronunciations, and real-world usage includes JEE-roh, JYE-roh, and the more Greek-sounding YEE-roh. The Greek source means...