Ever thought there ought to be an English word for this or that phenomenon? Such holes in the language are called lexical gaps. A listener in Ontario, Canada, notes that English lacks a single word for the mistake voice-to-text programs make when...
Elizabeth from New Orleans, Louisiana, is pondering the way catchphrases such as Matthew McConaughey’s Alright, alright, alright catch on and get passed around. These vocal memes or prosodic memes get repeated and passed around in a way that...
Poet James Merrill once compared the voice of Alice B. Toklas to “a viola at dusk.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A Viola at Dusk” The poet James Merrill once wrote about meeting Alice B. Toklas and he said that he had not...
Poet and teacher Frances Klein reports that a friend refers to the “overemphasized voice people use to read poems” as spoken Garamond. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Declamatory Font” I saw a tweet I really liked from poet and...
Kelly Barnhill is the author of four novels, including The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Bookshop|Amazon), which won the 2017 Newbery Medal for children’s literature. She’s also been helping neighborhood teens with their college essays, encouraging them...
Quntos KunQuest has been incarcerated at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, since 1997. His new novel This Life (Bookshop|Amazon), which draws on his experiences there, has earned acclaim in The New Yorker. KunQuest’s characters are vividly...