What do you call it when you’re homesick for a place you’ve never been? Is there a word for letting books pile up in your house without reading them? How about weather that looks beautiful out the window, but that you wouldn’t want to go out in? For this episode, we worked with Babbel to bring you our second annual Untranslatable Words challenge. In it, resi ... Show More
Feb 23
When Everything Stopped, He Started Listening
David Jeffers has always understood the world through sound. As a kid, he bounced beats between tape decks and built speaker boxes from spare parts. After college, he founded an underground hip hop label. Then came the day that split his life in two. And in the quiet that followe ... Show More
27m 44s
Jan 26
Doctor Who & The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
What does a time machine sound like? Or a magic carpet? For the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, that was just another day at the office. For 40 years, this oddball collective of engineers and composers pushed the boundaries of sound design, crafting eerie atmospheres, quirky jingles, a ... Show More
38m 15s
Jul 2023
Take Tea for the Fever (Rebroadcast) - 31 July 2023
Silence comes in lots of different forms. In fact, says writer Paul Goodman, there are several kinds: There's the noisy silence of "resentment and self-recrimination," and the helpful, participatory silence of actively listening to someone speak. Plus, the strange story behind th ... Show More
53m 45s
Oct 2023
Space Cadet (Rebroadcast) - 9 October 2023
We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing just individual letters, some ... Show More
53m 45s
May 2022
68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymo ... Show More
40m 48s
Oct 2023
Hair on Your Tongue (Rebroadcast) - 23 October 2023
If you speak both German and Spanish, you may find yourself reaching for a German word instead of a Spanish one, and vice versa. This puzzling experience is so common among polyglots that linguists have a name for it. • The best writers create luscious, long sentences using the s ... Show More
53m 45s
Aug 2020
Space Cadet (Rebroadcast) - 10 August 2020
We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing just individual letters, some ... Show More
55 m
Jul 2022
Excuse the Hogs - 11 July 2022
When a teenager went a week without talking as part of a school project, he noticed a surprising side effect: Instead of rehearsing a response to what other people were saying to him, he was focused on listening — and feeling smarter as a result. Plus, a flight attendant is irrit ... Show More
53m 45s
Jun 2016
Sweet Dreams - 20 June 2016
In deafening workplaces, like sawmills and factories, workers develop their own elaborate sign language to discuss everything from how their weekend went to when the boss is on his way. Plus, English speakers borrowed the words lieutenant and precipice from French, and made some ... Show More
53m 45s