A Houston, Texas, woman wants to know, “Why are there so many different dictionaries?” This is part of a complete episode.
A listener in Evansville, Indiana, wonders: Why do we say when something is undesirable that it’s for the birds? This is part of a complete episode.
Leah, a nine-year-old from Argyle, Texas, heard her mother answer a question with “No, no, no, absolutely yes.” Why did her mother seem to give contradicting answers at the same time? Short answer: there are two things going on: the...
Why do we use the term air conditioner to refer a machine for cooling air, when we use the word heater to describe a mechanism for heating air? The term air conditioning was borrowed from the textile industry, where it referred to filtering and...
A woman in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wonders: Why is the less busy period in a tourist area known as the shoulder season? This is part of a complete episode.
A Montreal, Canada, woman wonders why sometimes in old manuscripts the letter s looks like the letter f. A great resource on this topic is Andrew West’s blog Babelstone. This is part of a complete episode.