meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

The Many Meanings of 'Father.' How Watergate Changed English. Punim

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.52.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

"Father" as a word shows how we humans love to extend our metaphors. Did you know it was only relatively recently that priests were referred to as "father," for example? And then, for the 50th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, we look at the "-gate" suffix and what made it so successful that it has spread all over the world (even to non-English-speaking countries).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Grab a girl here. I'm Minyon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

0:10.1

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today,

0:16.7

in honor of Father's Day in the United States, we'll talk about the word Father and some

0:21.0

of it's more interesting meanings. And then, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Watergate

0:26.6

scandal, we'll talk about the gate suffix and its interesting uses. But first, I have

0:32.7

an interesting tidbit and a couple of corrections from listeners. First, following up on the

0:37.5

wisdom teeth piece from a couple of weeks ago, Daniel Sazanowski told me that in Japanese,

0:43.1

wisdom teeth are called Oyasara Noha. Forgive my pronunciation if that's really off. Meaning,

0:50.9

the teeth parents don't know about. I loved that because they tend to come in after a child

0:57.1

has moved out of the house. I found that just delightful. What a great name for them. Thank

1:01.2

you, Daniel. Next, in response to last week's piece about

1:04.6

Deminims, Kitty Mayhem on Twitter is Australian and asked me to point out that although I said

1:10.8

the nickname for Australians can be Aussie or Aussie, Australians themselves only use the

1:17.6

Aussie pronunciation. The British use Aussie too. It turns out that Aussie is a particularly

1:23.5

American pronunciation. And finally, eclectically, S on Twitter very kindly pointed out that

1:29.8

I had pronounced the name for people from Key West Wrong. It spelled C-O-N-C-H, which

1:36.5

I pronounced as conch, but it's actually pronounced conch. So people from Key West can be

1:42.5

called conchs, and the shell is pronounced the same way. Both pronunciations are actually

1:48.0

listed in the dictionary, but eclectically, S said when he visited, the locals told him

1:53.3

it was pronounced conch. Finally, since I'm doing housekeeping here, I also want to let

1:58.4

you know that I've completely revamped my email newsletter. And now, instead of just

2:03.0

providing links to what we've published in the past week, I'm writing summaries of interesting

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mignon Fogarty, Inc., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Mignon Fogarty, Inc. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.