Hi, all! In last weekend's archive episode, we discussed the musical language of railroad conductors’ calls. Also, the military slang term cumshaw, tips for learning Latin, the influence of Spanish on English, hell-to-the-no, and "how the...
Hi, language lovers! Happy March 4, and Happy National Grammar Day! (Get it? “March forth” and syntactically sin no more?) Join the revelry here: Just don’t say we didn’t warn you about the earworm from that grammar song, okay? We would have let you...
Grant and Martha recommend dictionaries for college students, both online references (OneLook.com, The Oxford English Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary) and the old-fashioned kind to keep at one’s elbow (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary...
A listener in Brazil challenges Martha’s pronunciation of the odd English word antipodes. Their email exchange leads Martha to muse about a favorite collection of poems, where she first encountered this word.
throw n. the distance that a key or button can be pressed, as on a computer keyboard. Etymological Note: Directly related to “throw” in mechanical engineering, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action or motion of a slide-valve, or of...
wireline adj. of communication or technology, connected by cable or wire; the opposite of wireless. Etymological Note: From the noun “wireline,” defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a telegraph or telephone line of wire” and dating to 1934...