Getting Down & Wordy

Today we talk about Coolio and his hit song "Gangsta's Paradise", and the etymology and history of paradise as a word and concept. For Eurovision, we discuss Ukraine's 2022 winning song Stefania by Kalush Orchestra.

In honor of Halloween we decided to talk about the Swedish metal band Ghost and the etymology of metal, both as a word for the substance and as a word for the music. In Eurovision, we talk about Azerbaijan's 2022 song Fade to Black by Nadir Rustamli.

We talk about the Eiffel 65 song "Blue", the etymology of the word blue and some common idioms and expressions using the word blue. And for Eurovision, this week we discuss Switzerland's 2022 song "Boys Do Cry" by Marius Bear.

We talk about Lil Uzi Vert. Are they a Dr. Seuss character? Also the history of the purse and how it became pointlessly gendered. And from Eurovision, we discuss Tiktok phenomenon song "Snap" by Rosa Linn, and a little about the Armenian language.

Special guest Paisely from the podcast Learn German Through Music joins us to talk about Die Toten Hosen, the etymology of beer and alcohol, and Oktoberfest. And we discuss 2022 Eurovision German entry, "Rockstar" by Malik Harris.

We talk about Rebecca Black's meteoric super hit song "Friday" and the history and etymology of the weekend. As for Eurovision, we discuss Sam Ryder's "Spaceman".

We talk about Beyonce's "Break My Soul", contractions, particularly "won't" and why it isn't "willn't". In Eurovision we talk about Moldova's "Trenuleţul" by Zdob şi Zdub & Advahov Brothers and the cedilla and the comma below in Romanian.

We talk about the etymology of the words nickname and pet name, why some nicknames don't look much like the name they're shortened from (like Robert -> Bob). Honorifics. Pet names through history. And for Eurovision we talk about Give That Wolf a Banana by Subwoolfer.

We talk about Lizzo and her use of the word "overstand" in a statement she made apologizing for using ableist language. We look at the history and meanings of overstand and also ableist language and words you may not have realized are ableist. For Eurovision, we do Slo Mo by Chanel and discuss a few of the differences between the Spanish of Spain and the Spanish of Latin America.

We discuss the etymology of the word gremlin from its origins in fighter pilot culture to the Chris Columbus movie, which . . is it racist? I mean, besides the Asian culture racism. Are gremlins a racist caricature of African Americans? Then we talk about some other country's weirdly specific monsters. And we discuss our first Eurovision song of the 2022 contest - Romania's Llamame by Wrs, plus Romanian idioms! . . Which are quite possibly the best idioms, it turns out.

Other stuff . . . for some reason we talk about how gold is calcified Jesus pee. We explain the slang 'no cap' and half explain 'ops'. The origin of the word 'glitch' and 'bug'. As usual, we did a lot of research and incorporated like 10% of it into the episode very ineffectually.

We do say the F word a few times here so I'm marking it explicit, but it's otherwise really tame and nice.