Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiet quiz involving words that are usually shouted. Suppose, for example, someone said, “Excuse me, Mr. Horse, I’d appreciate it if you stopped. What’s the exclamation suggested by this request? This...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle this week involves adding a letter to the names of famous bands to come up with entirely new ones. For example, Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool are trading in their instruments for a lime-colored...
Try this tricky puzzle: Take the words new door and rearrange their letters into one word. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “New Door Word Puzzle” You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and...
Did you know reading poetry improves your prose? That includes hip-hop lyrics, too. Also, how linguist can guess where you come from based on how you speak. What do you call someone who picks the chocolate out of the trail mix...
John Chaneski’s quiz adapts the National Puzzlers League puzzle type called a flat: a short verse with one or more blanks, an enumeration, and a stated bit of wordplay that turns one answer into another. These two-line flats use The Wizard of Oz...
For this week’s game, Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a word puzzle for license plate readers. Might those first three letters stand for a longer word? For example, MMT might be short for mathematics, while MMX could be flummox. The object of this...