Gossip goes by many names: the poop, the scoop, the lowdown, the dope, the scuttlebutt, the 411, the grapes, the gore, and hot tea. Plus, John Donne’s love poems are among the greatest in the English language, even as they’re famously difficult to unravel. A new biography hails the genius of the man who penned […]

Quiz Guy John Chaneski maintains that lots of nation’s names are hiding in plain sight during our everyday conversations, and he has a puzzle to prove it. For example, if he says, “Here on the farm, we don’t drink coffee. We just take the dry grass from the barn, steep it, and make ourselves some […]

A flash in the pan, meaning “something temporary or transient,” doesn’t derive from gold mining, nor does it have to do with cooking. It originated with firearms, specifically old-fashioned flintlock muskets. When a flinklock’s trigger is pulled, the hammer strikes a flint to create a spark that ignites the powder in a small pan. If […]

Amy is a historian who leads walking tours in Atlanta, Georgia, but she’s puzzled by the name of a certain roadway there. It’s called Airline Street, but despite its name, it has nothing to do with Hartsfield-Jackson International. The name of this street actually traces back to a railroad called the Airline Belle that once […]

In an earlier episode, the director of a women’s choir in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, wondered what to call it when her group gathers to sing together for the sheer joy of it. Listeners responded with many suggestions, including songfest, enchanted evening, choral fellowship, song circle, singamajig, and sing-along. A listener in Toronto, Canada, suggests an […]

Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one version of a thing becomes the default. For example, in a thousand years, food historians might not necessarily […]

While watching a broadcast about the Artemis moon launch, Josh from Jacksonville, Florida, noted that amid all the precise language, scientists describing precise orbital adjustments used the word tad, as in just a tad, which seemed like the opposite of precise. The word tad was American slang for a small child in the mid-19th century, […]

Daniel Mendelsohn is a widely acclaimed author, critic, classicist, and professor at Bard College. A few years ago, when he was teaching an undergraduate seminar on The Odyssey (Bookshop|Amazon) his 81-year-old father, Jay, decided to sit in on the class. Mendelsohn relates that experience and a subsequent father-son trip to retrace the Greek hero’s route […]

Lisa from Paris, Kentucky, grew up eating a German Christmas cookie at a friend’s house in Miami, Florida. This deep-fried, bow-tie-shaped pastry was made with butter, lemon, and rum, and dusted with powdered sugar. The family called them Hobelspäne (or Hobelspan in the singular). Hobelspäne translates directly as “wood shavings” or “planing chips,” after the […]

Tom Harris from Bluebell, Pennsylvania, wonders: In baseball, when a batter is said to take a ball, what exactly does take mean in that context? Batters have been advised to take a ball since the mid-1850s, when rule changes established the modern strike zone and forced batters to make split-second decisions about whether to swing. […]

Martha from Tallahassee, Florida, remembers hearing older relatives announce they were going for their constitutional, a term that traces back to Latin constitutio, meaning “character,” “disposition,” “nature,” or “the essence of a thing.” Its English offspring developed two tracks: political, as in the constitution that establishes a government; and physical-medical, as in the constitution that…

Novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince were very different types of artists, but they also had a lot in common. A new book chronicling their extraordinary careers becomes a larger meditation on perfectionism and creativity itself. Plus, the military origins of the term ballpark estimate. And when two people say the same thing simultaneously, […]

Connie from Marana, Arizona, grew up being warned that Rawhead and Bloody Bones would get her if she went rummaging in closets or her grandmother’s hope chest. The creature—or sometimes a pair of creatures—dates at least as far back as the mid-16th century, when an anti-Catholic pamphlet refers to Rawhed and Bloody Bone as secretaries […]

Next time you stub your toe, try letting loose with a Bandoozer! Sarah from Elk Rapids, Michigan, says her grandparents invented a fake swear word bandoozer to give kids the thrill of naughtiness without any real harm. Bandoozer doesn’t appear in any reference work, but the tradition of fabricated taboo language is surprisingly widespread, from […]

The word pobbies refers to a warm mixture of milk, bread, and sugar that British mothers traditionally gave children to fill them up or soothe them when they were unwell. This is part of a complete episode.

Outer space, used with its modern meaning, appears as early as the 1840s in a poem by Emmeline Stuart-Wortley. Soon after, Alexander von Humboldt was using variations on it in his writings about the cosmos. By 1901, H.G. Wells was using outer space in fiction, and within a few decades it had become the default […]

During the COVID-19 lockdown in the English countryside, writer Chloe Dalton stumbles upon a leveret no bigger than the width of her palm, lying motionless on a dirt road. Against her better judgment, she scoops it up. Most leverets in captivity die of shock or starvation, but she finds unlikely help in a poem by […]

Jodi, a native of California’s Central Valley, grew up using the word erp (or urp or earp) for vomiting—only to discover as a child that no one outside her family had heard it. The Dictionary of American Regional English documents urp as particularly common in the Mississippi Valley and surrounding areas. It also turns up […]

A listener who grew up in Newfoundland remembers her grandfather declaring the fog was thick as burgoo. Turns out burgoo was sailors’ slang for a gray, gelatinous oatmeal—exactly the right image for an impenetrable Newfoundland fog. The word appears in the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, though it likely came from England and Scotland. […]

The word cria refers to “a baby llama,” and derives from Spanish criar, meaning “to rear” or “to raise” a young animal. This is part of a complete episode.

Connie from Marana, Arizona, grew up being warned that Rawhead and Bloody Bones would get her if she went rummaging in closets or her grandmother’s hope chest. The creature—or sometimes a pair of creatures—dates at least as far back as the mid-16th century, when an anti-Catholic pamphlet refers to Rawhed and Bloody Bone as secretaries […]

Chase from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in Sacramento, California, where kids played Rochambeau instead of rock, paper, scissors. Why the difference in names? Nobody knows. Folklorists call this a choosing game, and while the hand-game itself likely spread when Europeans adapted a Japanese game called jan-ken-pon, the Rochambeau connection remains unexplained. There’s an even older […]

A writer stumbles upon a tiny, motionless creature on a country road and, against all good advice, takes it home. The resulting memoir, Raising Hare, is a lovely meditation on nature and our relationship to it. And: have you ever invented a fake swear word to hide the real ones from little ears? One family’s […]

Advice about college essays from the winner of a top prize for children’s literature: Kelly Barnhill encourages teens to write about experiences that are uniquely their own, from a point of view that is theirs and no one else’s. Plus, why do we say that someone who’s fortunate has the luck of the Irish? And […]

A new book about how animals perceive their environment reveals immense worlds beyond our own. A bee can see ultraviolet light, catfish have taste buds all over their bodies, and manatees use highly sensitive lips to examine nearby objects. Also, what’s the relationship between romantic novels and Romance languages? Plus, sometimes buying gingerbread isn’t just […]

While compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, lexicographer James Murray exchanged hundreds of letters a week with authors, advisors, and volunteer researchers. A new collection online lets you eavesdrop on discussions about which words should be in the dictionary and why — including words that might offend Victorian sensibilities. Also why are some words more pleasurable […]

A handy Armenian expression literally translates as “Don’t iron my head!” It’s used as a way of saying, “Stop pestering me with the same thing over and over.” This is part of a complete episode.

A useful new expression: AI breath. It’s associated with writing that feels stale and impersonal. As AI-generated prose becomes easier to spot, we’ll likely be getting more and more whiffs of AI breath. This is part of a complete episode.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski dons his deerstalker cap and offers a cryptic puzzle in which the combination of two clued words results in a single word. Take, for example, this clue: “A word meaning ‘distant,’ and the end of him is where you’ll find things growing.” Can you figure out those two words and, ultimately, […]

Why do regional accents develop, and why is it so difficult to shake one later in life? Valerie Friedman, a linguist at the University of Nevada, Reno, tackles those questions and more in Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents (Bookshop|Amazon). With wit and verve, she traces everything from infant babbling and […]