Tenley in Jackson, Wyoming, calls to share the bro-brah slang of fellow skiers there. If a skier or snowboarder is taking on a challenging run, others will cheer them on with Bro, send it! or Sick! You sent that!, and they use the adjective sendy...
Cody, who lives in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, wonders: If someone is hungry, you feed them, but is there a single word for what you do for someone who’s thirsty? In other words, eat is to feed as drink is to what? A single word isn’t...
At our recent appearance in Dallas, Texas, a listener asked about the use of fret as a transitive verb, as in “Don’t fret that child.” This usage is particularly common in the American South, and comes from the old notion of fret meaning to eat. The...
To frogmarch someone means to hustle them out of a place, usually by grabbing their collar and pinning their arms behind. Originally, this verb referred to police carrying an unruly person out of a building face down with a different person grasping...
A listener in Fargo, North Dakota, ask which is correct: graduated from high school or graduated high school? Increasingly, the former is falling by the wayside. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Graduate School vs. Graduate From...
Even though blogs can’t read and newspapers can’t speak, it’s totally appropriate to write “the blog reads,” or “the newspaper says.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Blog Reads” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, Martha...