A nurse in Jacksonville, Florida, finds that, without even being aware of it, she takes on the accent of her patients, and she wonders whether that’s because she’s in a profession where she needs to make strong connections quickly with people who need her help. When trying to connect with a stranger or a group, it’s not uncommon to take on their accent or gestures. Pietro Bortone offers a helpful explanation of what’s called linguistic accommodation in Language and Nationality: Social Inferences, Cultural Differences, and Linguistic Misconceptions. 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...
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