You’re in a business meeting. Is it bad manners to take out your phone to send or read a text? A new study suggests that how you feel about mid-meeting texting differs depending on your age and sex. Grant and Martha offer book recommendations...
Anne in Amherst, Massachusetts, remembers a family euphemism from her proper grandmother, born in 1869: instead of saying bull, she said the animal. That exact wording may have been her own, but the impulse fit a larger late-19th- and early-20th...
Do you start each day by "eating the frog"? Don't answer too quickly -- maybe you do and don't know it. "Eat the frog" means to do the most distasteful thing first. Imagine you were lost in the jungle and all...
A weep of willows, an embarrassment of weeds, and a pride of dandelions are listener-made collective terms for plants, following a recent conversation about the form. The fun depends on sound and sense: a churn of buttercups, a universe of cosmos, a...
Does the language you speak shape how you think? The hosts discuss an essay on that topic adapted from the new book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Buy Deutscher This is part of a complete episode...
Hello and happy Ides of March! On this week's show, the topic was wedgie technique, specifically the difference between a "murphy" and a "melvin." We also talked about the origin of "mad props," the uses of...