Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a puzzle called “Wordrows,” a.k.a. “Welded Palindromes.” They’re two-word palindromes, in other words. For example, what two-word palindrome means “beige bug”? This is part of a...
Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game called “Odd One Out,” the object of which is to guess which of four words doesn’t belong with the rest. Try this one: dove, job, polish, some. This is part of a complete episode.
In a 1936 episode of Jack Benny’s radio show, a woman says that her father sprained his ankle the night before while truckin’. This has an A Way with Words listener confused; she thought trucking was a term from the 1970s. Grant clears...
What does dog hair have to do with hangover cures? Also, where’d we ever get a word like “dude”? And what’s the word for when unexpected objects form a recognizable image, like a cloud that looks like a bunny, or the image of Elvis...
For a closer look at the language of the twitterati, check out Erin McKean’s recent piece in the Boston Globe. Glossaries of Twitter-related terms can be found at Twittonary, and Twictionary. We didn’t say all the coinages were clever...
A man who owns a parrot says that when people see his bird, they invariably ask the question “Polly wanna cracker?” He wonders about the origin of that psittacine phrase, meaning parrot-like. One of the earliest uses of the phrase so far...