Decoder Ring - The Mailbag Episode
Decoder Ring
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’re really lucky to get a lot of listener emails, suggesting topics for the show. In this episode, we’re going to dig into a handful of the most fascinating ones that we’ve yet to tackle on the show. We’re taking on five listener questions that run the gamut—from kids menus to succulents to the chicken that crossed the road. It’s an eclectic assortment of subjects that come to us thanks to you. So let’s jump into our mailbag.
Thank you to Mark Liberman and Susan Schulten.
This podcast was written by Willa Paskin who produces the show with Katie Shepherd. This episode was also produced by Sam Kim. Derek John is Slate’s Executive Producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
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Transcript
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| 0:41.2 | In the late 2000s, Karissa Langlow heard about this word that some people despised. |
| 0:47.0 | I had never thought about it before but as soon as somebody told me that they |
| 0:51.0 | hated the word, I was like, yeah, me too. It's it's pretty disgusting. The |
| 0:56.7 | word in question moist moist came into English usage in the 14th century and |
| 1:02.1 | over the next 700 or so years it seems to have been just another word like how |
| 1:07.5 | moisture and moisturizer are just words. By the end of the 20th century something |
| 1:14.2 | odd had started to happen. The one word that really surprised me I guess because |
| 1:18.0 | it hadn't showed up that much earlier was at the top of the heap on the ugliest |
| 1:21.8 | and that was the word moist. That's Mississippi State University professor |
| 1:25.8 | Robert Woolverton on NPR in 2001. For years he'd been asking students what words |
| 1:31.7 | they thought were the most beautiful and most ugly in the English language. |
| 1:36.6 | Moist hasn't looked back since. It showed up as a punchline on the TV show How I Met |
| 1:47.8 | Your Mother and also in dead like me and the onion. Language started to ponder |
| 1:52.1 | it in blog posts. The Facebook group I hate the word moist attracted thousands of |
... |
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