A caregiver in Calais, Vermont, says an elderly client insists on saying banana bag to mean a fanny pack. Banana bag is a term used by horseback riders to refer to a pouch that hangs by a saddle. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
What do you call it when you work for a corporation but aren’t based in the same place as its headquarters. Writer Michael Erard believes that the term working remotely doesn’t really characterize it, and instead has suggested working in...
One of the greatest novels in all of American literature was originally titled Catch-18. Then Joseph Heller found out that a novel about World War II called Mila 18 already existed. So he changed his book to Catch-22. And guess which American...
Saying “I feel,” instead of saying “I think” or “I suppose,” is both prevalent and controversial, particularly among women. A Stanford study found that prefacing a sentence with “I feel,” instead of...
Kurt Vonnegut gave us this timeless quote in his novel Cat’s Cradle: “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really...
Is there a word you keep having to look up in the dictionary, no matter how many times you’ve looked it up before? Maybe it’s time for a mnemonic device. And: a listener shares a letter from Kurt Vonnegut himself, with some reassuring...