Helloooo! Guess what’s starting this weekend? Brand-new episodes! It’s our sixth season as an independent national show and the show’s 15th season overall. We’ve come a long way from the crystal radio transmitter and kazoo...
On the website Ask Metafilter, I answered a question about dictionaries that I want to elaborate on here. Metafilter user “Aswego” inquired: Is there some super-secret linguistics resource that sorts dictionaries by...
I have a new neighbor, and I’ve been electronically snooping on him or her. I say “him or her” because the surveillance device is the PandaCam at the San Diego Zoo, which welcomed a bouncing baby panda a few weeks ago. And as the...
When I read this narrative about the making of the first edition of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus by former coworker Erin McKean, I was reminded of something that happened. I was one of the book’s editors and worked with its...
A day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, so astronomers have a word for that unit of time. They call it a sol, from the Latin word for sun. NASA scientists refer to and the day before the current sol as yestersol. They tried...
In a June episode, we asked you whether you thought cursive should be taught in schools. In an age where keyboarding classes are more common, and hand-writing anything beyond a signature seems to be a rare event, is there a place for the Palmer...