Favorite online reading. If the subjunctive tense were to disappear from English, would anybody care? And just in time for this romantic weekend, a caller discovers the meaning of…lurve. That’s L-U-R-V-E.
Who put the piping in the expression “piping hot”? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Piping Hot” You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett...
Puzzle Guy Greg Pliska takes equal portions of words and numbers, mixes well, and whips up a quiz called “Initiarithmetic.” The idea is to guess the words based on the initial letters of well-known phrases involving numbers. For example:...
Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a puzzle called “Wordrows,” a.k.a. “Welded Palindromes.” They’re two-word palindromes, in other words. For example, what two-word palindrome means “beige bug”? This is part of a...
Hey, hey, hey! It's another fat newsletter from "A Way with Words"! We never run out of things to talk about. Take this past weekend's show, for example. We tracked down the history of "Polly wanna cracker." It turns out...
Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a puzzle in which participants try to guess a word that could logically go before or after each of a trio of words. For example, if the three words are “nest,” “calories,” and “suit,” the...