A listener emails to say that her nonagenarian mother adopted a special project during the pandemic. She compiled a lexicon of words and phrases used by their family when the kids were growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. The resulting 33-page...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle involves words that share a common lexical bond. For example, what one word unites the terms apple, chill, bird, bang, and gulp? This is part of a complete episode.
A funny piece in The New Yorker by Jay Martel suggests a new lexicon for the pandemic, including the body mullet worn on Zoom calls (“Business up top, party down below”), and new names for days of the week to reflect the way they all...
The autocomplete function on your phone comes in handy, of course. But is it changing the way we write and how linguists study language? Also, suppose you could invite any two authors, living or dead, to dinner. Who’s on your guest list and...
Scott in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wonders if the words nother as in a whole nother and abso-bloomin-lutely are real words. Yes, they are! The construction a whole nother is an example of what linguists call tmesis, which involves the insertion of a...
In the Navy and the Marines, if someone goes hermantile, they’re angry, shouting, and unpredictable. This slang expression is of uncertain origin. It goes back to World War I but has stayed almost exclusively within the military’s...