Space Cadet (Rebroadcast) - 9 October 2023

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

🗓️ 9 October 2023

⏱️ 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/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 a way with words, the show about language and how we use it.
0:03.9	I'm Grant Barrett.
0:04.9	And I'm Martha Barnett.
0:06.7	We all have had the experience of doing work that's tedious or pointless, and the French
0:12.2	have a wonderful term for that, that translates as combing the giraffe, do you know this one?
0:17.9	Pagnée-la Giraffe, which refers to the idea of doing something that's just, you know.
0:23.9	Right, how do you get up there?
0:25.5	You gotta get the ladder.
0:26.5	He's not gonna stand still.
0:27.5	Right.
0:28.5	He doesn't care very much.
0:30.3	He's not helping.
0:31.5	I learned that from a new book by Canadian author Mark Abley.
0:35.7	It's called Watch Your Tongue.
0:37.4	What our everyday sayings and idioms figuratively mean.
0:41.3	And Mark is from Canada.
0:42.7	He's the author of spoken here, travels among threatened languages, which I really loved.
0:47.8	It takes you on a tour of the world's endangered languages from the Arctic Circle all the way
0:52.1	down to Australia.
0:54.1	And this book is a delightful compendium of things like that.
0:57.9	I also learned in his new book that in Korean, the word for, of course, or absolutely, sounds
1:05.1	a whole lot like the word for carrot.
	...

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