Potato Wagon - 20 January 2025

A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over

A Way with Words

Education, Language Learning, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thunderstorms might sound scary, but playful explanations for all those booms can help reassure little ones: How about The potato wagon's rolling over the bridge? Or The angels are going bowling? Plus, if you just finished enjoying an audiobook, you might say you've read it, but a listener asks if there's a better word. And: towns with names that are three letters long--or less. They're fun to say, and super easy to spell! The town of Eek, Alaska, for example, is spelled E-E-K. Plus, the use of humming to mean "stinking," slashfic and shipping, woodshedding, ratcatcher, bib and tucker, a memoir that features recipes handed down through a Black Appalachian family, a "buzzling" puzzle or a puzzling "buzzle," and I had one of those, but the wheels came off. 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]. Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.7	You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language, and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.
0:35.2	And I'm Martha Barnett, and there are some names of towns that I always
0:40.0	have trouble spelling, Tallahassee, for example. Yes, that was the one that came to mind immediately.
0:46.5	How many Ss are in that word? Yeah, how many S's, how many Ls? I always... Do they have a rhyme or
0:52.5	mnemonic to help out? Right. I hope our Tallahassee listeners
0:56.5	can help us with that because I always have to go look up how to spell Tallahassee. I'm sure there's a
1:01.8	trick, but I don't know it. But you know, there are some town names that are really easy to spell.
1:09.2	Some of them just have one letter.
1:11.3	One letter.
1:12.2	One letter.
1:13.4	For example, the town of E.
1:15.3	It's a little town in northern France,
1:17.6	and it just has two main streets which come together
1:20.8	to form the shape of the letter Y,
1:23.1	and they just call that town E.
1:25.2	And then there's another town in Norway,
1:28.4	in northern Norway.
	...

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