A professional auctioneer shares some techniques for creating his mesmerizing, melodious patter. He explains that auctioneers are known as colonels, because colonels in the civil war were assigned with auctioning off captured property. And he warns...
Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? (Or a jaboney, jadroney, jambone, jiboney, gibroni, gibroney, gabroney, jobroni, jobrone, etc.) Grant traces this playful insult, meaning a “rube” or “loser,” to the...
When it comes to language, a listener from Dallas wants to know, as a fellow Texan might put it, “who’s the decider”? Grant explains that nobody makes the rules about language, and everybody does. For those seeking professional...
Hi, all! In this week's brand-spankin'-new episode: Ever wonder what's up with the term "meteoric rise"? Don't meteors plummet? Also, "myriad" vs. "a myriad of," "enamored of" vs...
A professional musician maintains that many people use the word crescendo incorrectly. This is part of a complete episode.
silver n.— «Even the so-called better prints that pirates affectionately call silver” are not free of bloopers. One young media professional was amused to find Brad Pitt crying in Spanish in what the cover promised to be the English...
