Podcast Episodes
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Episode 249
The book and lyrics of 'The Music Man' are replete with everyday, ordinary dialogue that, nevertheless, demonstrates how English often works.
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3 years, 5 months ago
The Problem with You
Episode 248
English used to have a more or less typical array of second person pronouns, with thou and thee for the singular — subject and object cases, respecti…
3 years, 5 months ago
The Rodney Dangerfield Pronoun
Episode 247
Comedian Rodney Dangerfield was fond of introducing jokes with a kind of redundancy, for example: “My wife, she told me I was one in a million. I fou…
3 years, 6 months ago
Is Negro a Slur or Just Antiquated?
Episode 246
The racial reckoning of the past several years has altered the way we think about and use language, often for better but occasionally for worse. Some…
3 years, 6 months ago
One Is the Loneliest Number
Episode 245
'Only,' 'lonely,' 'alone' and even 'atone' all derive from the number 'one,' which, by the way, wasn’t always pronounced as if it began with the lett…
3 years, 7 months ago
Throw Up, Turn Out & Believe
Episode 244
Words like chit-chat, pitter-patter and wishy-washy are formed that way for a reason beyond the pleasing way that they sound. The vowel change actual…
3 years, 7 months ago
Why Fidget Poppers Are "Satisfying"
Episode 243
What does the proliferation of so-called ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos say about the nuanced use of the word "satisfying"?
Visi…
3 years, 8 months ago
Why Do We Dot Our i's?
Episode 242
As a guest on The Late Show, John told Stephen Colbert that there was nothing especially interesting to say about the word "I." Well, he takes that b…
3 years, 8 months ago
You Are SO Articulate. Really.
Episode 241
Do you remember learning — in grade school most likely — the difference between a count noun and a mass noun? Probably not, and yet chances are that …
3 years, 9 months ago
When Words Collide
Episode 154
We are frequently asked — often by young listeners who are fascinated by language — how English could possibly accumulate the many thousands of words…
3 years, 9 months ago