Science Diction

By Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Society & Culture History

What's Science Diction about?

What does the word “meme” have to do with evolutionary biology? And why do we call it “Spanish flu” when it was never Spanish? Science Diction is a podcast about words—and the science stories within them. If you like your language with a side of science, Science Diction has you covered. Brought to you by Science Friday and WNYC Studios.

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New Show: Universe of Art

08.07.2023

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Science Diction episodes:

08.07.2023 New Show: Universe of Art Science Friday’s new podcast about science-inspired art is out now!
04.05.2022 Saying Goodbye To Science Diction Dear Science Diction listeners, It is with sadness that we announce the finale of the Science Diction podcast. Starting with a simple newsletter and a passionate audience, the Science Diction podcast grew to serve up episodes on topics as varied ...
12.21.2021 American Chestnut: Resurrecting A Forest Giant We have a favor to ask! We want to know more about what you like, what you don’t, and who you are—it’ll help us make better episodes of Science Diction. Please, take our brief survey. Thank you! At the turn ...
12.07.2021 Vocal Fry: Why I’m Not Getting A Voice Coach For decades, vocal fry lived a relatively quiet existence. It was known to linguists, speech pathologists and voice coaches, but everyday people didn’t pay much attention to it. But then in 2011, people started noticing it everywhere. So what happened? ...
11.23.2021 Juggernaut: Indian Temple Or Unstoppable Force? In 2014, a grad student in Kolkata named Ujaan Ghosh came across an old book by a Scottish missionary. And as Ghosh paged through the book, he noticed the missionary kept using a word over and over: Juggernaut. But the ...
11.02.2021 Jargon: We Love To Hate It Head on over to plainlanguage.gov, and you’ll find a helpful table, dedicated to simplifying and demystifying military jargon. On one side of the table, there’s the jargon term, and on the other, its plain language equivalent. “Arbitrarily deprive of life”? ...
10.19.2021 Algebra: From Broken Bones To Twitter Feuds When high schooler Gracie Cunningham posted a TikTok asking where algebra came from, she probably didn’t expect to become a viral sensation. There were the usual Twitter trolls, but some unexpected voices also began piping up, causing a flurry in ...
09.28.2021 Hurricane CORRECTION: In this episode, we say that there were only two names left on the 2021 list of Atlantic hurricane names until we resume use of the Greek alphabet letters. In March 2021, the World Meteorological Association decided to end ...
09.14.2021 Knock On Wood And Tsunami Journalists Kevin McLean and Shalina Chatlani join us for a round of Diction Dash, where Johanna tries - and usually fails - to guess the true meaning or origin of a word. If you’re curious about a word, get in ...
08.31.2021 The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 3: What Is It Good For? When Isabel Briggs Myers imagined that her homegrown personality test would change the world, she couldn’t have pictured this. Today, millions take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator each year. Countless organizations use it, from General Motors to the CIA. But there’s ...
08.24.2021 The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 2: Isabel At first, it seemed like Isabel Briggs Myers would have nothing to do with personality typology. That was her mother Katharine’s passion project, not hers. But when Isabel enters a tumultuous marriage, she discovers that her mother’s gospel of type ...
08.17.2021 The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 1: Katharine If you’re one of the 2 million people who take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator every year, perhaps you thought Myers and Briggs are the two psychologists who designed the test. In reality, a mother-daughter team created the test essentially at ...
08.03.2021 Honeymoon: A Bittersweet Beginning Honeymoon: It just seems like a word that would have a lovely story behind it, doesn’t it? When a listener named Eric emailed us from Centerville, Ohio asking about the word, that’s what we were hoping to find. Instead, we ...
07.07.2021 It'll Never Fly: When Gene Names Are TOO Fun In 1910, a fruit fly geneticist named Thomas Hunt Morgan noticed something strange in one of his specimens. Out of his many, many fruit flies—all with brilliant red eyes—a single fly had white eyes. This fruit fly turned out to ...
06.22.2021 What Do You Call A Tiny Octopus That’s Cute As A Button? What pigment do we owe to the squid? And what do you name a teeny tiny octopus that’s cute as a button? In this episode of Diction Dash, we’re talking about those clever and often tentacled marine invertebrates: Cephalopods. Diana ...
06.08.2021 Language Evolves: It’s Literally Fine If you read the title of this episode and cringed, you’re not alone. At Merriam-Webster, editors and lexicographers receive countless letters grousing about the addition of certain words to the dictionary. And here at Science Diction, we get our fair ...
05.25.2021 Serendipity and Syzygy: Fortunate Accidents How did a country's name end up inside the word, “serendipity"? And what’s a “syzygy"? And, more importantly, why does it have so many y’s? Over the past year, several listeners have written to us asking about these two words. ...
05.11.2021 Ambergris: How Constipation Becomes A Luxury Product Last month, Science Diction received a letter from a listener named Ben. He wanted to know about ambergris, a strange substance that washes up on beaches from time to time. So today, we’re talking about this thing that for centuries, ...
04.13.2021 Orphans Delivered The World's First Vaccine When the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use last December, it felt like - at last! - our nightmare was nearly over. Then came reports of botched distribution efforts, from broken websites to factory mix-ups. Scientists created the ...
03.30.2021 Diction Dash: You Asked, We Answer Over the past year, you’ve sent us words you want us to cover on the show. And for months, we let those suggestions pile up into a list of nearly 200 words. Today, we begin to chip away at that ...
03.16.2021 Introvert: The Invention Of A Type In 2013, introverts staged their comeback. For decades, they’d been told to get out of their shells and smile, while those showy, gregarious extroverts were held up as the American ideal. But when one author published a kind of introvert’s ...
03.09.2021 Mercury: How It Made Cats Dance In 1953, in the coastal town of Minamata in Japan, locals noticed some cats were acting strangely—twitching, spinning in circles, almost dancing. The reality was far darker. What looked like dancing was really convulsions. The cats drooled, spun in circles, ...
03.02.2021 Alcohol: History's Favorite Mind-Bending Substance Vervet monkeys steal it out of people's hands. Chimpanzees in Guinea are known to climb up palm trees and drink it. There’s even a theory that loving it was an important adaptation for our pre-human ancestors, that the smell of ...
02.23.2021 Robot: Making A Mechanical Mind In 1920, a Czech writer was stumped. He’d written a play about a future where machines that looked like people do our bidding. They were the perfect workers: obedient, hard working, and never demanded a pay raise. But what was ...
02.16.2021 Lunacy: Mind Control From The Sky On December 5th, 2012, a bill landed on President Barack Obama’s desk, meant to do one thing: remove the word “lunatic” from the federal code. This is because in 2012, you could still find the word in laws about banking ...
02.09.2021 Mesmerize: The 18th Century Medical Craze Behind the Word In the late 18th century, a doctor showed up in Paris practicing some very peculiar medicine. He would escort patients into dimly lit rooms, wave his arms over their bodies, and touch them with a magnetic wand. Patients would react ...
02.02.2021 Science Diction Returns For Season 3 Science Diction is back with a new season all about mind control—what happens when we decide to create new minds and they refuse to be controlled, why we’ve long believed the moon had the power to control our minds, and ...
11.24.2020 How Do You Name A Hurricane? How did we wind up with a storm named Iota? Well, we ran out of hurricane names. Every year, the World Meteorological Organization puts out a list of 21 names for the season’s hurricanes and tropical storms. But this year, ...
10.16.2020 Hydrox: How A Cookie Got A Name So Bad The first Oreo rolled out of Chelsea Market in Manhattan in 1912, but despite the cookie’s popularity today, Oreos weren’t an immediate cookie smash hit. In fact, there was already another cookie on the block that looked remarkably similar to ...
09.22.2020 How Did The ‘Cosmic Crisp’ Apple Get Its Name? This fall, there’s a new apple all around town. After 20 years of development, the Cosmic Crisp has landed. In this episode, we’re bringing you a special collaboration with another podcast called The Sporkful. They’re a James Beard Award-winning show ...
08.25.2020 Restaurant: How It All Began In the 1760s, a new kind of establishment started popping up in Paris, catering to the French and fancy. These places had tables, menus, and servers. They even called themselves “restaurants,” and you might have too, were it not for ...
08.18.2020 Umami: A Century Of Disbelief Salty, sweet, sour, bitter. Scientists once thought these were the only tastes, but in the early 20th century, a Japanese chemist dissected his favorite kombu broth and discovered one more: umami. In recent years, umami has become a foodie buzzword, ...
08.11.2020 Guest Episode: Communal Eating With ‘Gastropod’ This week, we’re sharing an episode from an excellent food podcast, Gastropod. This show is right up our alley—co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley serve up episodes that “look at food through the lens of science and history.” What’s not ...
08.04.2020 Rocky Road: Why It Sounds So Dang Delicious Rocky Road is just a good name for an ice cream flavor. So good, in fact, that two ice cream institutions have dueling claims to Rocky Road’s invention. It’s a story of alleged confessions and a whole lot of ice ...
07.28.2020 Ketchup: A Fishy History At the turn of the 20th century, 12 young men sat in the basement of the Department of Agriculture, eating meals with a side of borax, salicylic acid, or formaldehyde. They were called the Poison Squad, and they were part ...
07.23.2020 Science Diction Digs Into Food Over the next few weeks, we'll investigate the science, language, and history of food.
04.28.2020 Spanish Flu In the fall of 1918, Philadelphia newspapers announced that a new virus had arrived in the city, the so-called “Spanish flu.” But the facts and scope were muddy and uncertain, and the city decided to push forward with a highly-anticipated ...
04.07.2020 Quarantine Quarantine has been on many of our minds lately. The phrases “shelter in place” and “self-quarantine” have filled up our news, social media, and conversations since the first inklings of the coronavirus pandemic. But this is far from the first ...
03.10.2020 Meme Remember that summer when the internet was one Distracted Boyfriend after another—that flannel-shirted dude rubbernecking at a passing woman, while his girlfriend glares at him? Everyone had their own take—the Boyfriend was you, staring directly at a solar eclipse, ignoring ...
03.10.2020 Vaccine For centuries, smallpox seemed unbeatable. People had tried nearly everything to knock it out—from herbal remedies to tossing back 12 bottles of beer a day (yep, that was a real recommendation from a 17th century doctor), to intentionally infecting themselves ...
03.10.2020 Dinosaur At the turn of the 19th century, Britons would stroll along the Yorkshire Coast, stumbling across unfathomably big bones. These mysterious fossils were all but tumbling out of the cliffside, but people had no idea what to call them. There ...
03.10.2020 Cobalt Cobalt has been hoodwinking people since the day it was pried from the earth. Named after a pesky spirit from German folklore, trickery is embedded in its name. In 1940s Netherlands, cobalt lived up to its name in a big ...
02.27.2020 Science Friday Presents: Science Diction From the people who make Science Friday, we bring you Science Diction, a bite-sized podcast about words—and the science stories behind them. Hosted by SciFri producer and self-proclaimed word nerd Johanna Mayer, each episode of Science Diction digs into the ...

Science Diction

What's Science Diction about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Science Diction episodes:

New Show: Universe of Art

Saying Goodbye To Science Diction

American Chestnut: Resurrecting A Forest Giant

Vocal Fry: Why I’m Not Getting A Voice Coach

Juggernaut: Indian Temple Or Unstoppable Force?

Jargon: We Love To Hate It

Algebra: From Broken Bones To Twitter Feuds

Hurricane

Knock On Wood And Tsunami

The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 3: What Is It Good For?

The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 2: Isabel

The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 1: Katharine

Honeymoon: A Bittersweet Beginning

It'll Never Fly: When Gene Names Are TOO Fun

What Do You Call A Tiny Octopus That’s Cute As A Button?

Language Evolves: It’s Literally Fine

Serendipity and Syzygy: Fortunate Accidents

Ambergris: How Constipation Becomes A Luxury Product

Orphans Delivered The World's First Vaccine

Diction Dash: You Asked, We Answer

Introvert: The Invention Of A Type

Mercury: How It Made Cats Dance

Alcohol: History's Favorite Mind-Bending Substance

Robot: Making A Mechanical Mind

Lunacy: Mind Control From The Sky

Mesmerize: The 18th Century Medical Craze Behind the Word

Science Diction Returns For Season 3

How Do You Name A Hurricane?

Hydrox: How A Cookie Got A Name So Bad

How Did The ‘Cosmic Crisp’ Apple Get Its Name?

Restaurant: How It All Began

Umami: A Century Of Disbelief

Guest Episode: Communal Eating With ‘Gastropod’

Rocky Road: Why It Sounds So Dang Delicious

Ketchup: A Fishy History

Science Diction Digs Into Food

Spanish Flu

Quarantine

Meme

Vaccine

Dinosaur

Cobalt

Science Friday Presents: Science Diction