After our earlier conversation with Amanda in Evansville, Indiana, whose family refers to their garbage disposal as George, a listener shares his own family’s term for this device: the spoon sharpener. This is part of a complete episode.
Amanda in Evansville, Indiana, says for some reason her family always referred to their garbage disposal as George, a name that functioned as both noun and verb, as in Just put it in George or You can George it now. Might that be something inherited...
How does social context shape our perception of language? When hiking the Appalachian Trail, a young woman from Wyoming found that fellow hikers assumed she was from another country, not only because of how she spoke, but also how she looked...
Jill in Shelton, Washington, says that when she lived in Southern California, she understood the word garbage to mean food scraps, with trash referring to everything else collected curbside. Historically, garbage has referred to the wet, disgusting...
grapple truck n.— «There are trucks which has a grapple loader mounted to its frame and are used to carry bulky waste or garbage are called as Grapple trucks. These trucks are used at construction sites to pick up dirt which has been...
phytocapping n.— «Landfill sites produce the greenhouse gases, methane and carbon dioxide, as putrescible waste decays. Growing plants and trees on top of a landfill, a process known as “Phytocapping,” could reduce the...