Space Cadet - 24 December 2018

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

A Way with Words

Education, Language Learning, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing just individual letters, some palindromes are sentences with reversed word order. • Also squeaky clean, dad, icebox, search it up, pretend vs. pretentious, toe-counting rhymes, comb the giraffe, a Korean song about carrots, a word game, and more. 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 [email protected]. 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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0:23.8	Engineered to do it all. That's a laptop evolved with Intel Evo Platform.
0:27.8	You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
0:34.0	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:35.0	And I'm Martha Barnett.
0:36.6	We all have had the experience of doing work that's tedious or pointless, and the French
0:42.2	have a wonderful term for that that translates as
0:44.8	combing the giraffe you know this one? Parnier la Giraffe which refers to the
0:51.6	idea of doing something that's just you know right how do you get up there
0:55.2	got to get the ladder he's not gonna stand still he doesn't care very much he's not helping
1:01.4	I learned that from a new book by Canadian author Mark Abley. It's called
1:06.0	Watch Your Tongue. What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively mean. And Mark is from Canada.
1:12.4	He's the author of Spoken Here,
1:14.4	Travels Among Threatened Languages, which I really loved. It takes you on a tour of
1:18.7	the world's endangered languages from the Arctic Circle all the way down to Australia.
1:24.1	And this book is a delightful compendium of things like that.
1:27.8	I also learned in his new book that in Korean the word for of course or absolutely sounds a whole lot like the word for carrot
	...

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