We explore language today!

What's that? We explore language every Wednesday because of The Word Nerd?

To that we rebut: indeed. But how is this Wednesday different from any other Wednesday?

Perhaps it's because we had a great listener question from a listener about the origins of certain English phrases (inspired by our look at the origins of the language in a previous show). So Emily Brewster, resident wordster and senior editor at Merriam-Webster, dives right into the Middle-English of things to show us how some common phrases have evolved, and giving us more food for thought in the process.

Or perhaps it is because we spent time with Polly Byers of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding. Their Building Resilience Against Violent Extremism in Schools (or the BRAVE Schools) program seeks to help middle and high school students, as well as the staff in those institutions, in using dialogue to deescalate instances of violence and hate. This weekend, they host "Bringing the Lessons Home:The Power of Dialogue, Locally and Globally" at the Amherst Women's Center to help folx see the applicability of the word to help everyone near and far.

But mostly we're thinking it's because we have a bonus Live Music Wednesday. On tour from Boston, and making a stop at the Jewish Community of Amherst, is Levyosn. With their name taken from the Ashkenazi Hebrew for “Leviathan”, the group specializes in Yiddish song and klezmer, but they also sing in Hebrew, Ladino, and English and draw from adjacent Eastern European folk traditions, all of which you can hear on their brand new album "Lullabye". Lucky for us, they dropped by the studio to give us a taste of that new album in person.