In our latest online-only episode, Martha’s been putting together a collection of your favorite collective nouns and Grant joins her to swat around a caller’s question about what to call a game of tennis when you have only three players...
Earlier this summer a word caught my fancy: “gardentoolism.” So I made a slang quiz about it!
Few are the words whose origins we know for certain, but “bunk” is one of them. From the mountains of North Carolina to the halls of Congress to everyday language, Martha scoops the skinny:
Yo, listeners! There’s another online-only podcast from “A Way with Words.” This time, Grant answers questions about the word “agio” from a fellow in Kamloops—learn more about that name, too—and he responds to reader...
In June, Grant attended the biennial meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America. One of the highlights was the New Word Open Mic where anybody was invited to step up to the microphone and submit a new word they had coined or found. Grant was...
Martha muses about the secret lives of flowers in this week’s podcast. She’s been pondering the lexical legacy of Carolus Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist who nearly 300 years ago was criticized for his fascination with what was a...