Paul in Camden, Maine, has adopted a new pup, and the dog’s exuberant face-licking has Paul wondering about the many meanings of the word lick, which include getting his licks in and takes a licking, which refers to the act of forcefully beating someone or something. With roots that stretch back more than a thousand years to Old English liccian, meaning “to pass the tongue lightly over a surface,” lick has come to mean a variety of things, including “a small amount” and “to vanquish.” More recently, some youngsters are boasting about devious licks, stealing items from school and showing them off on TikTok. Lick is a great example of polysemy, the capacity for a word or phrase to have more than one meaning. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
Subscribe to the fantastic A Way with Words newsletter!
Martha and Grant send occasional messages with language headlines, event announcements, linguistic tidbits, and episode reminders. It’s a great way to stay in touch with what’s happening with the show.
