A Way with Words | Punctuation

Deviled Eggs (episode #1554)

Posted by Grant Barrett on September 14, 2020 · Add Comment

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Play It by Ear (episode #1553)

Posted by Grant Barrett on August 31, 2020 · Add Comment

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. Sometimes our perception of other people’s accents have more to do with social context [...]
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Beside Myself (episode #1535)

Posted by Grant Barrett on November 4, 2019 · Add Comment

The new Downton Abbey movie is a luscious treat for fans of the public-television period piece, but how accurate is the script when it comes to the vocabulary of the early 20th century? It may be jarring to hear the word swag, but it was already at least 100 years old. And no, it’s not [...]
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Semicolon Book

Posted by Grant Barrett on November 2, 2019 · Add Comment

Science historian Cecelia Watson’s splendid new book Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark is her long love letter to an underappreciated punctuation mark. This is part of a complete episode.
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Bangorrhea

Posted by Grant Barrett on March 23, 2019 · Add Comment

In her 1958 memoir Beloved Infidel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover Sheilah Graham recalls the famous author’s distaste for exclamation points, the use of which he compared to “laughing at your own joke.” Some have proposed that such overuse of exclamation marks be called bangorrhea, bang being an old printer’s term for that punctuation mark, and [...]
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South African “Shot” Slang

Posted by Grant Barrett on December 17, 2018 · 1 Comment

Cory in Newark, Ohio, says that while in South Africa, he heard the exclamation shot! used in an empathetic way to mean “that’s so sweet!” or “bless your heart!” In South Africa, the word can be used to express agreement, and in Australia, the expression “That’s the shot!” expresses approval. In boxing, a skillful punch [...]
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