Carpe diem! A new book reveals the surprisingly unfamiliar stories behind familiar quotations. Also: Rock climbers have gumbies, and surfers have kooks. What do those words say about beginners who…

00:00 – Boston Public Radio 11am 2:00:00 – The Curiosity Desk 1pm ...

“Are we ready to order yet?” Why do restaurant servers use the word “we” when they’re not eating with you or helping you pay the bill? And a story of Cold War intrigue: A young saxophone player’s…

“Cornbread,” a poem by Kentucky writer Silas House, is thick with sensory memories of Appalachian cooking and family: scooping cornmeal by hand and “the splash of egg, the gallop of buttermilk.

If you don't know love from a let, or a grand slam from a walkover, we've got you. Here's the history behind all those strange tennis terms.

In a series of recent social media posts, curators at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles are rating the best variations on art-adjacent emojis.

Forensic linguistic analysis of two recently released emails may shed light on who abducted the mother of Today Show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie.

Two big, wonderful things happened in 2006 that changed my life: I married my wife, Sarah, and I joined A Way with Words. That’s basically two marriages. I say that because a marriage is about a…

Critters, co-workers, and clothes: What do you call your favorite mixed-breed dog? There are Heinz 57 mutts and Texas brown dogs in the U.S., while in parts of the Caribbean they’re called potcakes…

The Velocity of Romance: Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Marriage Fraud Rings Targeting Vulnerable Men. It happens in St. Louis, MO, as well.

From Dr. Pimple Popper to How I Met Your Mother, Forged in Fire to Buffy, I’ve been exploring the “vast wasteland” of low-brow TV. Journey with me through the gems and clunkers, a…

A middle school teacher in Flower Mound, Texas, responds to students’ protests and excuses with if all our buts were candied nuts, we’d all be fat for Christmas. It’s probably a variation of a phrase…

We counted every letter across the 172,835-word ENABLE list. Scrabble's tile values don't match how letters actually occur: C is worth more than three lower-value tiles it outnumbers, H outscores B, and 11 letters carry a value out of line with how often they appear.

Wiktionary has done a wonderful job on documenting written languages, from major linguae francae to hinterland tongues with little record, and even recreated languages proposed by linguists who ima…

In the 103rd and penultimate game of the 2026 World Cup, a Scorigami finally happened, but what is it?

The term eavesdropping arose from the practice of secretly listening to conversations while standing in the eavesdrip, the gap between houses designed to keep rain dripping off one roof and onto the…

In How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words (Bookshop|Amazon), British journalist Sophia Smith-Galer writes about linguicide, the erasure or suppression of a language.

Differences between “essential vocabulary” lists, 1953 vs. 2023

Neural maps reveal the specialized cells that produce speech.

On the one translation choice I have been asked about a gazillion times, as if it were the only translation choice I’ve ever had to make…

If someone tells you it’s flisky or flobby outside, do you need to take an umbrella? A new book about England’s soggy climate includes 188 terms for rainy weather. Americans have their own joking…

AI can help move analysis forward, but human ingenuity is still essential in this field.

It’s an oft-asked question, so let’s take a stroll through the vegetable patch while dueting on “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off” and see if

Freud observed that people who have much in common can still fight bitterly because they grow overly sensitive to the disagreements remaining between them. He called this the “narcissism of small differences”: “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.” In Gulliver’s Travels, 11,000 people die in a war between the Big-endians, who break their eggs at the big end, and the Little-endians, who break them at the little end. A Lilliputian admiral attacks Gulliver because “he had good reasons to think you were a Big-endian...

Lily in Madison, Wisconsin, wonders about the use of the words vibe and vibing to mean “having a good time” with someone else. The sense of vibrations reflecting some kind of mystical connection goes…

A listener in Fairbanks, Alaska, says her husband has long referred to her as a whippersnapper, insisting it’s a playful term of endearment. Whippersnapper goes back to the 17th century…

Tom from Phoenix still remembers losing a seventh-grade spelling bee over dilemma, because he had been taught there was a silent n and wrote dilemna. The standard spelling is dilemma…

So, get ready to watch the skies with us! Here are the top astronomical events happening this year:

The noun camp and the adjective campy refer to movies, theater, or a style or an exaggerated manner of creative or personal expression that combines high and low elements of culture.

Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificent history, The Warmth of Other Suns, chronicles the Great Migration of American blacks from the Southern United States starting in the era of Jim Crow. In it…

As my community modernized, we used Pennsylvania Dutch less and less. Now I'm trying to preserve it.

As online research evolves, so has the language we use to describe it.

Secure the generous severance bag or jettison up the corporate ladder? That was the question.

Hypochondria derives from the Greek preposition hypo, meaning “under,” as in the hypodermic that goes under the skin, and hypothermia, the condition of being insufficient heat.

Mission: Translate an interstellar message, using the universal languages of math & science.

In Arabic-speaking families, it’s not uncommon for mothers to address their children with the Arabic word for “mama” or for fathers to use the word for “father” when addressing their offspring.

What’s up with ketchup? The shifting history and spelling of the name of this condiment. For centuries, ketchup was a fishy sauce originating in Asia—the tomatoes came only later! Plus…

The first semifinal matchup at the 2026 World Cup featured two European giants, France and Spain. Neither team had lost a game so far, and their styles of

Tim from Jacksonville, Florida, has long been teased for saying milk more like melk and eggs with a vowel closer to ages. His mother’s South Carolina accent and his father’s Newfoundland accent may…

You’re not going crazy

That little button on top of a baseball cap? Some people call it a squatchee or a squatcho, the latter popularized by comedian Rich Hall’s book Sniglets (Amazon), which features apt but made-up words…

Windy paused once she made it to the Flash Fiction Metaverse Mansion. Hydra’s many-headed laughter came from… somewhere in there. Not that she was surprised after so many FFMers misinte…

The phrase I reckon meaning I suppose is marked in the United States as rural, rustic or uneducated. The term is centuries old, however, and used widely in the United Kingdom. This is part of a…

It builds on things you already do.

It was the trial membership open house for the Order of Logogustation, and I was circulating, doing my best impression of an extravert to welcome prospective members. As I neared a man and a woman,…

A Vermont listener says that if she has to be absent from work due to illness, she would call in sick. Her twenty-something daughters, however, use the phrase call out sick. Is this a generational…