You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

The funniest Twitter thread I've read in ages was started by Shannon Proudfoot.

She's a writer in Ottawa.

And she asked the world, what's the most mundane but

thunderous epiphany you've ever had, something so ridiculously dull or elementary

that still bowled you over when you figured it out.

Oh boy.

And there were a lot of really useful things like the fact that on a lot of

dashboards of cars it has the little picture of the gas tank and there's a little

arrow showing you which side the opening is on. See I knew you would know this already.

And did you know that a lot of elevators

doing once if they're going up and twice if they're going down?

Oh, I love it.

I didn't believe it, but I ran out to the elevator in my building and sure

enough that elevator did that. Now I'm bringing this up because there are also a lot of

things that involve language. Yeah people confess that when they were

young and heard about guerrilla warfare they thought it was actually

gorilla's fighting with jungle. Yeah, and somebody wrote, my sister was about 22 when she realized that the AM radio stations work afternoon.

Oh.

She thought AM was about morning time only, right?

...