Did we stop referring to young urban professionals as yuppies? A listener in Madison, Wisconsin, says his younger co-workers told him they’d never heard of the word. The use of the word yuppie peaked around 1990, and has dramatically dropped ever since. Hippie, on the other hand, arose in the 1940s, then peaked around 1970, but had a resurgence in 2013 before starting to decline again. This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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