Wayne in Sherman, Texas, wonders how the term pear-shaped came to describe something that’s gone badly. The expression seems to have arisen during the Falklands War of the early 1980s. If you need a word for pear-shaped, there’s always pyriform...
How far back does cursing go? People have been using coarse language for thousands of years. Just check out the filthy graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. Although cursing has changed over time, the F-word and its ilk have been around for hundreds of...
A listener in Norwich, Connecticut, is going through a trove of love letters her parents sent each other during World War II. In one of them, her father repeatedly used the word hideous in an ironic way to mean “wonderful.” Is that part...
The exhortation in Shakespeare’s Henry V, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” is now a part of common speech. But not every fan of the Bard knows what a breach is. It’s simply a gap—a space between two things. This is...
The emphatic exclamation “from hell to breakfast” goes back to the Civil War. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “From Hell to Breakfast” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi there, this is Brad Davis calling...
A professional auctioneer shares some techniques for creating his mesmerizing, melodious patter. He explains that auctioneers are known as colonels, because colonels in the civil war were assigned with auctioning off captured property. And he warns...