Your New Favorite Word

This week, Jamis gives permission to call your loved one a “pig’s eye”, which, when pronounced “pigsney”, is actually a term of endearment. Just don’t be “a nidget” about it. Meanwhile, Tessa tells her word histories straight, no chicanery, pettifoggery, or quibbling.

Tessa presents the unexpected musical past of the word “gamut”, while Jamis shows how a single word can come to mean two completely opposite things in different languages.

Jamis wonders what’s akimbo in “akimbo”, and Tessa pinches no pennies in exploring the history and relations of “miser”.

Tessa, in her typically limpid style, introduces the concept of phantonyms. Jamis explores what constitutes his personal idiolect.

Jamis talks about his musings on the past tense of “must”, and how it led him to the past subjunctive, and an unexpected swapping of tenses in Middle English. Tessa frantically charges into the concept of “berserk” from Old Norse sagas, and explores the word cloud around it.

Tessa explores the word cloud around the concept of “cheating”, which leads her to a deliciously fudgy destination. Jamis digs into the grubby etymology of the mining slang word “grubstake”.

Jamis’ crossword habits lead him to the surprising word “tatterdemalion”, and prompt him to dig deeper. Tessa, like the word nerd she is, investigates the Seussian origins of the word “nerd”.

Tessa dabbles in the surprising world of English words with frequentative suffixes. Jamis discovers pleonasms, and shares them with you “free, gratis and for nothing.”

Jamis takes us back to the early days of the word “nostalgia”, and its unlikely roots in medical diagnoses. Tessa reviews a picture book about the life of Dr. Peter Mark Roget, creator of the famous (well-known, widely-recognized, familiar, proverbial) thesaurus.

In this episode, Tessa investigates euphemisms for death and dying in English and other languages. [Our dialog here is fairly lighthearted; if you’ve recently lost someone close to you, you might want to skip this section.] Jamis takes a Proto Indo-European root and runs wild with it, exploring all its pointy, poignant, and pugnacious descendants.