Grabber girl here. I'm Nion Fog Fog Fog and we have an especially fun show this week for

Halloween because I am here with Jess Zaffyrus who is the author of the new book

Words from Hell all about scary naughty bad words which is kind of funny because

her past book was a lovely book for children so of the

end of the spectrum to the other.

Jess is the creator of the blog Useless Etymology.com

she has a very popular Tik-Toc account about Etymology.com. She has a very popular Tik-Tok

account about etymology. We briefly did a Tik-Tok game show together and she is

also my new contact at Reagan Communications so we're working together on the

advanced AP style webinar that I have coming out next week. So can't wait to

talk about these horrible words. Welcome Jess. Thank you so much I am so excited to be here and it's funny that you bring up my first book once upon a word because until Halloween of this year I will be a children's book author and then on Halloween when the book releases I will

instantaneously no longer be a children's book author by any means.

And I guess before we get started I am curious what possessed you to write this book.

Well, a bunch of ghouls and ghosts for one, but also just generally a love and curiosity of words.

It's always been one of my favorite things to do and I you know I found

while I was writing once upon a word the children's book that there were many words I couldn't

include some of which we will talk about today because they were just too dark.

Like I wanted to address a range of animals and I wanted to arrange spooky words but I couldn't include them and my editors on the

children's book told me to eliminate them from the manuscript so I started

saving them in a document and I also found that I have a

fairly large Tik-Toc audience who listens to me talk about word origins and I

found that those folks often were the most excited to learn about words that were just a little bit

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