James is from southwest Michigan, which was heavily settled by the Dutch. He grew up using the adjective logy, meaning “lethargic,” and was surprised to learn that friends from elsewhere didn’t know the word. He wonders if he knows...
Martha recommends Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, a deeply personal, exuberant account of falling in love with both ancient and modern Greek by Mary Norris, former copy editor for The New Yorker. Norris shares several intriguing modern...
The word fulsome has undergone some real semantic changes over the years. It used to mean “excessive, overly full” in a negative way, but it’s come to have positive connotations for some, who think it means “copious” or...
The animal called an aardvark takes its name from an Afrikaans term meaning “earth pig.” The word is cognate with the English words earth and pork. This is part of a complete episode.
Many of the world’s languages apparently derived from a prehistoric common ancestor known as Indo-European. But since no one ever wrote down a word of it, how do we know what it was like?
What’s lurve got to do with it? A caller is puzzled by a greeting card with the phrase “crazy cosmic lurve god.” Linguistics fans will fan themselves as Grant explains the roots of this expression with linguistic terms like the...