A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.
Hey! It's another newsletter from "A Way with Words," which this week was called "entertainingly erudite" by William Safire in the New York Times. Suh-weet! Our latest erudition came in the form of talk about "apple...
kitchen sink-it v. phr.—Gloss: To report the worst financial performance possible. «In a note to clients yesterday, Credit Suisse analyst Thomas Gallagher said that although the number seems high, it is “plausible, especially if AIG...
Here’s a riddle: “Nature requires five, custom gives seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven.” Think you know the answer? You’ll find it in this week’s episode, in which Grant and Martha discuss this and other...
actigraphy n.— «They also filled out sleep questionnaires, kept a log of their hours in bed and participated in six nights of sleep studies with a technique called wrist actigraphy that uses a motion sensor—worn like a watch—to estimate...
To “go commando” means to “go without underwear.” But why commando? An Indiana listener says the term came up in conversation with her husband after one of them had a near-wardrobe malfunction. She mercifully leaves the rest...