Niblings and Nieflings (Rebroadcast) - 23 November 2020

A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over

A Way with Words

Language Learning, Society & Culture, Education

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do actors bring Shakespeare's lines to life so that modern audiences immediately understand the text? One way is to emphasize the names of people and places at certain points. That technique is called billboarding. And: Anyone for an alphabet game? A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. There's the one about the quick, brown fox, of course. But there's a whole world of others, including pangrams about Brexit, emoji, and a pop singer behaving, well, badly. Plus, sworping, agga forti, spelling out letters, the uncertain etymology of kazoo, larruping, the hairy eyeball, where the woodbine twineth, and a brain teaser based on characters that might have been in a Disney movie. Read full show notes, hear hundreds of free episodes, send your thoughts and questions, and learn more on the A Way with Words website: https://waywordradio.org/. Email words@waywordradio.org. Twitter @wayword. Our listener phone line 1 (877) 929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada. Elsewhere in the world, call +1 (619) 800-4443; charges may apply. From anywhere, text/SMS +1 (619) 567-9673. Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You hear that? That's the sound of your energy use going in reverse.
0:07.0	Rewinding, reducing. We're Ovo, an energy company that wants you to use less energy.
0:19.0	Some may see that as a bit backwards, but we like to see things differently.
0:26.0	Join us and see energy from a different angle.
0:29.0	Ove.
0:30.0	You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
0:33.5	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:34.5	And I'm Martha Barnett.
0:36.0	In 1994, a software engineer named Anugarg started WordSmith.org, the popular website for language lovers, and this includes his immensely
0:45.6	popular word a day, email, his anagram server where you can go to test anagrams, and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of WordSmith.org, he conducted some worldwide
0:57.6	contests with Limerick and Anagrams and Pan-Grams. Now you know what a Pan-Grams.
1:02.4	Yeah, Pan-Grams, these are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet and they have to be grammatical.
1:07.0	Right, right. So for example, the famous one is, The Quick Brown Fox jumps over the lazy dog but he asked people to write an
1:16.1	original pangram that describes an event that happened in the last 25 years so
1:20.0	something from science or the arts or business or politics and I happen to be one of the
1:25.4	judges for that contest and I am here to tell you the winner of a Pan-Gram
1:29.9	contest.
1:30.9	Emogee having been popularized, texts acquire wacky faces.
1:36.0	Wow, that's pretty good.
1:37.0	And it's short, too.
1:38.0	It's short, it's just 48 letters, and it makes sense, too.
1:42.0	Yeah, it does make sense. It's hard to say though. It's yeah it's tricky to say I was
	...

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