Van from Washington, D.C., is curious about the word fluffle, which supposedly denotes “a group of bunnies.” A friend of hers claimed to have coined this collective noun for lagomorphs along with friends at the University of Alberta in Canada some...
A San Diego, California, guy says his high school history teacher used the phrase chop chop wiki wiki meaning “Hurry up!” The first part of this phrase comes from similar-sounding Cantonese words — the source also of the chop in chopsticks — and the...
We often hear that English is going to hell in a handbasket. Actually, though, linguistic handwringing about sinking standards and sloppy speech has been going on for centuries – at least as far back as the 1300’s! And: language also changes to fit...
Frequent the adjective and frequent the verb can be pronounced differently, with the verb getting an emphasis on the second syllable. Wikipedia has a great list of these heteronyms, where two words are spelled the same but pronounced differently...
Chai tea is not redundant—just tasty. But that doesn’t stop people from debating the question. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Chai Tea Redundancy” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Christina, and I’m calling from...
What the fox says may be a mystery, but we do know that dogs bark differently around the world. In China, for example, they say not bow-wow but wang wang. Also, the story behind the British tradition of scrumping. It’s not a middle school dance...
