A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over

Put on the Dog - 2 April 2018


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A young patron's sense of wonder prompts a moving tweet by a staffer at the Toronto Public Library.

The phrases to put on the dog and putting on the dog refer to ostentatious behavior, and in particular to dressing in a flashy way. But what do dogs have to do with stylish clothing?

Our discussion about the many ways to say someone is pregnant prompts a listener to share another one he picked up from broadcaster Paul Harvey: infanticipating.

A woman in San Diego, California, says that when she was making too much noise as a youngster, her dad would gently reprimand her by saying You're a noisy piece of cheese.

Need a mnemonic to remember difference between the spelling of the palate in your mouth and an artist's palette? Associate the one in your mouth with the past tense of the verb to eat.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski, who also writes for Paid Off, a game show starring Michael Torpey, offers a game-show style puzzle. For example, what are the top 3 most likely responses from Google's autocomplete feature if you type in the question Why does my arm . . . ?

Whatever happened to saying You're welcome? A Lantana, Texas, woman observes that during media interviews, people will often respond to a Thank you by saying Thank you themselves.

A listener in Hope, North Wales, points out that there's punny way to spell a hungry horse in four letters. (Hint: one synonym for horse is gee-gee.)

A 10-year-old in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, says friends correct him whenever he says funner and funnest. Are they really words, and if so, is it okay to use them?

A law enforcement officer says he and his colleagues are curious about how the word pig came to be used as a derogatory term for police. This use has a long history that goes back more than two centuries.

The term cowbelly is used in Louisiana to mean both a kind of work shoe and  soft river mud. This kind of silt has been described evocatively by writer Conger Beasley, Jr.

A tweet soliciting the biggest lies people heard from other kids while growing up turns up some whoppers, like the boy who claimed his great-great-great-great grandfather was Elvis.

What you call the space between two mountain peaks depends on which part of the country you're in. The word gap is used more in the Southern United States, notch in the Northeast, and saddle or pass in the West.

There's a word for those noble souls who're picking up litter while they jog. They're ploggers.  The neologisms plogger and plogging are a combination of the English word jogging and  Swedish plocka upp, which means pick up.

A listener in Omaha, Nebraska, says that when he was being particularly inquisitive, his grandmother would exclaim, You ask more questions than a Philadelphia lawyer! This term for a particularly shrewd attorney goes all the way back to the late 18th century, and may be a reference either to Ben Franklin or the Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton, who successfully defended German-American printer John Peter Zenger.

The term mind-boggling describes something that has a powerful effect on the mind. Sometimes it's misunderstood as mind-bottling, an eggcorn popularized by a Will Farrell movie.

The Italian-American slang word skutch refers to someone who's being annoying, and derives from the Italian word scocciare, which means to pester.

The Japanese have a term for the act of buying books but letting them pile up without reading them. It's tsundoku.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all overBy Hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. Produced by Stefanie Levine.

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