Category: neologisms

384: Mailbag of Welcome

30 October 2019 / / Comments Off on 384: Mailbag of Welcome

Welcome to our mailbag, where all the really great questions come from.

  • Why do we say “You’re welcome”?
  • How can varelse mean ‘a being’ in Swedish, but ‘a room’ in Danish?
  • In sci-fi, what happens when the universal translator breaks?
…

378: Bugger All (with Isabelle Burke)

17 September 2019 / / Comments Off on 378: Bugger All (with Isabelle Burke)

You might do nothing. You might do zilch. But if you do bugger all, you’re really doing the minimum.

But wait — how did the phrase bugger all become a negative, in the complete absence of any negative words?

There …

371: -nado, -holic, -pocalypse: Combining Forms (Live Q&A)

16 July 2019 / / Comments Off on 371: -nado, -holic, -pocalypse: Combining Forms (Live Q&A)

Take a tornado. Add some sharks. You’ve got a sharknado.

But it’s not just sharks that can leap out of their normal context. It looks like –nado is jumping free and becoming a combining form — a part …

353: Mailbag of Highly Intelligent Listeners

27 February 2019 / / Comments Off on 353: Mailbag of Highly Intelligent Listeners

Listeners have sent us a bracket of great questions.

Will there ever be only one language on earth? When was the beginning of buzzwords? And why do some people say I have went?

We’ll give our best answers on …

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