If your friend says she"s coming to town "Sunday week," exactly when should you expect to see her? And what do you call those typographical symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? Plus grass widows, the linguistic phenomenon called creaky voice, the difference between insure and ensure, the roots of the term jingoism and what it means if someone says "You don"t believe fatmeat is greasy." Also, is it okay to make a noun out of a verb?

This episode first aired January 21, 2012.

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Researchers have found that stress is a leading cause of plewds — you know, those drops of sweat popping off the foreheads of nervous cartoon characters. That"s one of several cartooning terms coined by Mort Walker, creator of the Beetle Bailey comic strip. Martha and Grant discuss this and other coinages from The Lexicon of Comicana.

If someone"s coming to town Sunday week, when exactly should you expect them? This Scots-Irish term means "a week after the coming day mentioned."

What are those symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? They"re called grawlixes — good to know for the next time you play a game we just invented called "Comic Strip Trope or Pokemon?"

Is it okay to make a verb out of a noun? Yes! It"s estimated that twenty percent of English verbs started as nouns. Just think of the head-to-toe mnemonic: you can head off a problem, face a situation, nose around, shoulder responsibility, elbow your way into something, stomach a problem, foot the bill, or toe the line. Verbing weirds language.

Squeans are the little starbursts or circles surrounding a cartoon character"s head to signify intoxication or dizziness.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called "Categories". The challenge is to find the common thread that unites seemingly unrelated things. For example, Mary-Kate and Ashley, Jack Sparrow"s crew, and cherubim all fall into which category? The answer: Twins, Pirates, and Angels are all baseball teams!

What"s a grass widow? In the 1500s,this term applied to a woman with loose sexual morals. Over time, it came to mean a woman who"s been separated from her husband, or a divorcée.

If someone"s jingoistic, they"re extremely patriotic, often belligerently so. The term comes from a British song written in 1870 that uses the phrase "by jingo!" to conjure up enthusiasm for a British naval action.

The curved lines that follow the moving limbs of cartoon characters? Those are called blurgits or swalloops.

The admonition "you don"t believe fatmeat is greasy" is found almost exclusively among African-Americans. The idea is apparently that if you don"t believe fat meat is greasy, you"re someone who misses the obvious.

What"s the difference between the words insure and ensure? To ensure means to make certain. Insure means to protect someone or something from risk, and should be used exclusively in a financial sense.

For some time now, linguists have been studying a style of speaking known as "creaky voice." In the United States, it"s heard particularly heard among young white women in urban areas. New research about this phenomenon, also known as vocal fry, has been making the rounds on the internet.

Voilà (not spelled "wallah" or "vwala") is a good example of a borrowed word. Though French for "there it is," Americans often use it as a simple utterance, akin to presto or ta-da.

Lock the bad guys up in the hoosegow! This slang term for a jail comes from the Spanish "juzgado," meaning "tribunal." It"s an etymological relative of the English words "judge" and "judicial."

Did you know roly-polies, or pill bugs, aren"t even bugs? They"re isopods, meaning they have equal feet, and they"re technically crustaceans.

Autocorrect mistakes abound, but have you ever made the errors yourself, such as typing the word buy when you meant by? Studies in Computer Mediated Communications have linked this phenomenon to the way we process words phonetically before typing them out.

Solrads are those lines radiating from the sun or a lightbulb in a comic strip, while dites are the diagonal lines on a smooth mirror.

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