Niblings and Nieflings (Rebroadcast) - 8 January 2024

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

🗓️ 8 January 2024

⏱️ 52 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/contact. Be a part of the show: call 1 (877) 929-9673 toll-free in the United States and Canada; worldwide, call or text/SMS +1 (619) 800-4443. Email words@waywordradio.org. Twitter @wayword. 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're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
0:03.4	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:04.4	And I'm Martha Barnett.
0:06.0	In 1994, a software engineer named Anugarg started WordSmith.org, the popular website for language lovers, and this includes his immensely
0:15.6	popular word a day, email, his anagram server, where you can go to test anagrams, and
0:22.1	to celebrate the 25th anniversary of WordSmith.org he conducted some
0:27.0	worldwide contests with Limerick and Anagrams and Pan-Grams. Now you know what
0:31.8	a Pan-Grams. Yeah, Pan pangrams, these are sentences that contain
0:35.0	every letter of the alphabet and they have to be grammatical. Right, right. So for example, the famous
0:39.8	one is the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog but he asked people to write an
0:46.0	original pangram that describes an event that happened in the last 25 years
0:49.7	so something from science or the arts or business or politics and I happen to be one of
0:55.2	the judges for that contest and I am here to tell you the winner of a Pan-Gram
0:59.8	contest. Emogee having been popularized, texts acquire wacky faces.
1:06.4	Wow, that's pretty good.
1:07.3	And it's short, too.
1:08.3	It's short, it's just 48 letters,
1:10.2	and it makes sense, too.
1:12.2	Yeah, it does make sense. It's hard to say though. It's yeah it's tricky to say I was
1:16.5	lobbying for a different one which was Watson excels at Jeopardy quickly out-buzzing human favorites.
1:22.8	I like that.
1:23.8	Yeah.
	...

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