Pickled Peppers - 5 August 2024

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A Way with Words

Education, Language Learning, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Names don’t always mean what you think they mean. Main Street in San Francisco is named after businessman Charles Main, and Snowflake, Arizona, honors two guys named Snow and Flake. Plus, big words for small people: A colorful new book introduces kids to colossal words (including the word colossal!). And limber up those muscles — we have a trove of terrible tongue twisters to try! Also, invoice, a delicious quiz about food, stilliform, crepuscular, make the cheese more binding, skycap, scofflaw, rutschy, epizootic, and wrongs of passage. 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 [email protected]. 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 Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.
0:05.6	And I'm Martha Barnett. The main street in San Francisco is not Main Street. The main street there is actually called Market Street and it goes on for several
0:15.5	miles. Now, San Francisco does have a Main Street, but it's just five blocks long and it's harder
0:22.2	to find.
0:23.6	Now you might wonder why that is.
0:25.2	Well, it turns out that San Francisco's little bitty main street
0:29.0	is named for a 19th century businessman
0:31.8	whose name happened to be Charles Maine.
0:35.0	How about that?
0:36.0	That makes a lot of sense.
0:38.0	Wait, so it's not because it's the primary street, it's just named after this guy.
0:42.0	Who was this guy. Charles Maine
0:44.4	made his fortune supplying miners during the gold rush and the city honored him
0:49.1	with a street named after him just happened to be called Main Street. That's always the way to make
0:54.2	the fortune. Sell the tools, don't do the digging. Exactly. And that's just one story that shows
1:02.4	that names don't always mean what you think they mean.
1:06.0	And I'll give you another example. I always thought that Snowflake Arizona was probably named because the locals were transplants from the north or maybe they were
1:16.2	wistful about cooler weather. But no, Snowflake Arizona was founded in 1878 by a couple of guys named Erastus Snow and
1:27.2	William Jordan Flake. How about that? And I should add that William Jordan
1:31.8	Flake, one of the founders, is the great-great-grandfather of somebody
1:35.4	you might have heard of, former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake.
1:39.2	Oh, there we go. That's pretty interesting. Snowflake Arizona.
	...

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