A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems, lyrics, and much more, from colonial times to the present. Plus, the story behind the phrase what are the odds? And speaking of odds, what’s the cha...

A lifeguard in Central Florida is perplexed when his fellow lifeguards indicate they’ve heard a radio transmission by responding with a phrase like Tower Two copies rather than Tower Two, copy. Which is correct? They both are. The word copy in radio parlance goes back to telegraph operators literally copying Morse code messages onto paper. The copies in Tower Two copies is pe...

Cynthia in Austin, Texas, grew up hearing her father say, No soldiering! when the kids weren’t pulling their weight in the kitchen. She was recently reminded of his admonition when she saw a bumper sticker that read no sojering. Both soldiering and its variants sojering and sogering mean “shirking” or “malingering.” This expression dates back to at least the 1840 and likely s...

A mangle is an old device for squeezing water from laundry. In 19th-century England, this word figured in the discourteous catchphrase Has your mother sold her mangle? The question implies that the person addressed has to make ends meet by selling their mother’s mangle. For a while, youngsters would run up to strangers and shout this phrase just to be annoying, but this not-s...

A ballicater is a jagged wall of ice that forms on a frigid shore when pans of ice catch on rocks and slush freezes over them. A Canadian woman who grew up in Newfoundland says she’s warned never to go near one. Ballicater, spelled several ways, including ballycatter, is found in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, and may be an alteration of barricade or the Spanish barr...