Let’s put the moose on the table: You have questions, and Grant and Martha have answers. For example, why would someone have an albatross around the neck? And what’s so cool about bees’ knees, anyway? Plus, jockey boxes...
Sheila in Billings, Montana, noticed that she and her husband, both from Colorado, use the two-syllable pronunciation of coyote, something like /KYE-oat/, while their children back East hear the three-syllable version more often, more or less /kye...
Hi-ho! Here's another newsletter from A Way with Words. Over the weekend listeners coast-to-coast got an earful about "druthers," "to vet," "stingaree," "beck and call" and more. Catch up here:...
Martha talks about the hoopoe, that colorful, clownish, extremely smelly bird—with a likely linguistic connection to defrauded hedge fund investors.
This week’s Slang This! contestant shares his favorite slang term, teho, (To Each His Own), then tries to puzzle out the meaning of the terms karzy and low-bush moose. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Karzy and Low-Bush...
Bop-lop-a-boom-bop lop-bam-boom. It's another issue of the A Way with Words newsletter! This past weekend we aired an episode in which a caller told us that she finds the word "moist" repugnant. She's not...