Claire from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, shares a phrase dear to her late friend. Her friend was known for saying since Christ left Philadelphia, meaning “a very long time ago.” This expression fits a well-worn pattern of comic hyperbole using...
Why do we write the sound of a dog barking as bow wow? Isn’t that noise more like woof, woof or arf, arf or ruff ruff? Surprisingly, the oldest of these is bow wow, or as William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest (Bookshop|Amazon), bowgh wawgh...
Suppose you could invite any two authors, living or dead, to dinner. Who’s on your guest list and why? Deciding that question may say a lot about you. Martha’s choices: Sappho and Toni Morrison. Grant’s: Akhenaten and Ben Franklin...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game about Dirkens novels — that is, Dickens novels with one letter in the title changed. For example, what’s the Dirkens novel about a domicile where tired orphans can take some time off work, or a shorter Dirkens...
A few weeks ago, a listener was looking for a term to describe the copy of The Emperor’s New Clothes that he’d read many times as a child. In this picture book, the naughty bits were always cleverly covered up. Thinking he wanted a synonym for “fig...
What did Shakespeare’s plays sound like in his day? An acting teacher with an interest in dialects wants to know how researchers reconstruct Elizabethan speech. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “How Shakespeare...