A Louisiana listener shares a favorite passage from Laurie Lee’s memoir Cider with Rosie (Bookshop|Amazon), about his boyhood in post-World-War II England. An extract is here and contains the passage:“For the first time in my life I was out of the...
Amanda in Tucson, Arizona, dislikes the phrase kill two birds with one stone and wants to popularize a non-violent alternative: feed two birds with one seed. An Alaska listener once suggested the phrase save two birds with one stone, perhaps...
In this week’s puzzle, John Chaneski imagines the possibilities in several alternate universes. For example, what show would have hired him as the Quiz Guy if he’d answered an ad to create games involving nuthatches, northern flickers, and ospreys...
While vacationing on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, a listener encountered an Australian who used the term skylarking to mean “horsing around.” The verb to skylark goes back hundreds of years and once referred to racing through the rigging of a...
The term callow goes back to Old English calu, meaning “bald.” The original sense of callow referred to young birds lacking feathers on their heads, then referred to a young man’s down cheek, and eventually came to mean “youthful” or “immature.”...
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, and a beautiful video of a murmuration of starlings flying about has been described by Martha as “nature’s ornithological lava lamp.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A Murmuration”...
