Welcome to another newsletter from A Way with Words!
This newsletter was originally supposed to go out on Monday, May 12th, but our service provider had a snafu and the messages disappeared into the ether. There are a lot of creatures on planets near Alpha Centauri scratching their heads right now.
This past weekend we had a rollicking good time on the air as we talked about words we mispronounce on purpose, "around Robin Hood's barn," the military slang term "jody," and "big box stores."
https://www.waywordradio.org/coinkydinks/
Talking about words we say wrong on purpose sprung from a newspaper column Grant wrote:
https://www.waywordradio.org/sayingitwrong/
Well-known blogger Jason Kottke, and many others, took up the idea in their blogs and lots of people admitted that they, too, said things in a goofy way just for the fun of it. More than 200 comments about it are here:
http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/04/15376.html
Our colleague Ben Zimmer pointed to an article where this phenomenon was discussed in 1932:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005524.html
This week Martha talked about weird book titles, like "I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen." More examples:
http://thebookseller.com/news/53656-oddest-book-titles-prize-shortlist-announced .html
We also talked about "Jody cadences" used in the military. Find out what a Jody cadence looks like:
The producer of the PBS children's show "Wordgirl" played our slang quiz. The show starts its new season May 26th and goes daily instead of weekly. Get the word:
Finally, we leave you with this silly video from JibJab. It's about "big box stores."
http://www.jibjab.com/originals/big_box_mart
Best wishes,
Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett
