John Koenig joins us to discuss his work coining new words and phrases that he hopes will perfectly capture the nuance and beauty of specific moments in our lives when the words we have at our disposal fail.
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A Nine Letter Word For Diversion: Crossword
Adrienne Raphel joins us to talk about how these newspaper throw-ins became a fixture of daily life.
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Inside The World Of Competitive Spelling
Vauhini Vara joins us to talk about why the Scripps National Spelling Bee has been dominated by Indian-American competitors.
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Use Your Words
This hour, we’ll talk about how we can more carefully pick the words that convey what we mean with UT-Austin professor James Pennebaker.
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The Life Of A Speechwriter
We’ll talk about the process of populating all those TelePrompters with Barton Swaim, a one-time speechwriter for former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
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A Logophile’s Dream
Queries about sweet soup, the endearment “my boo” and fossil poetry were all on recent episodes of “A Way With Words.” This hour, we’ll talk with the show’s hosts, Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, about their most frequent questions– as well as the most wacky.
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Redefining The Dictionary
Heads up, word nerds: Merriam-Webster is revising its famous third edition of the dictionary. Hopefully the finished read will be perfectly pellucid (adjective, easily intelligible or clear). We’ll talk about what we an expect.
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