Quiz Guy Greg Pliska drops in with a word game called “False Opposites.” They’re pairs of words whose prefixes, suffixes, and other elements make them appear to be opposites, even though they’re not. For example, what seeming...
Chickens give more than eggs, meat, and feathers—they give language!
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...
Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game called “Odd One Out,” the object of which is to guess which of four words doesn’t belong with the rest. Try this one: dove, job, polish, some. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
In a 1936 episode of Jack Benny’s radio show, a woman says that her father sprained his ankle the night before while truckin’. This has an A Way with Words listener confused; she thought trucking was a term from the 1970s. Grant clears...
What does dog hair have to do with hangover cures? Also, where’d we ever get a word like “dude”? And what’s the word for when unexpected objects form a recognizable image, like a cloud that looks like a bunny, or the image of Elvis...

