Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski came across the term hugger-mugger, which inspired a puzzle with answers that involve two words, each ending in -er. For example, in the past these were attached using a sticky surface, but these days they’re made from...
Piper from Reno, Nevada, wonders why a movie trailer is called a trailer when it comes at the beginning of a film. Isn’t a trailer something that follows something else? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Why Do Movie...
Ahoy! In this week’s brand-spankin’-new episode: Great gifts for language lovers, nerds vs. geeks, “tow the line” vs. “toe the line,” the slang term “poutrage,” and the crust in the corners of your...
Well, snap! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words," the pluperfect radio show. Did you hear the program this past weekend? If not, you missed a brand-new doozy from the boozy two-sy (kidding about...
Thunder and lightning! It's another email newsletter from "A Way with Words," where we put the "recess" in "recession." In our latest broadcast we talked about "fankle," baby platypuses (as they say at...