A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Martha from Tallahassee, Florida, remembers hearing older relatives announce they were going for their constitutional, a term that traces back to Latin constitutio, meaning “character,” “disposition,” “nature,” or “the essence of a thing.” Its English offspring developed two tracks: political, as in the constitution that establishes a government; and physical-medical, as in t...

Tom Harris from Bluebell, Pennsylvania, wonders: In baseball, when a batter is said to take a ball, what exactly does take mean in that context? Batters have been advised to take a ball since the mid-1850s, when rule changes established the modern strike zone and forced batters to make split-second decisions about whether to swing. The 1854 source documented in Edward J. Nich...

Lisa from Paris, Kentucky, grew up eating a German Christmas cookie at a friend’s house in Miami, Florida. This deep-fried, bow-tie-shaped pastry was made with butter, lemon, and rum, and dusted with powdered sugar. The family called them Hobelspäne (or Hobelspan in the singular). Hobelspäne translates directly as “wood shavings” or “planing chips,” after the way the twisted ...

Daniel Mendelsohn is a widely acclaimed author, critic, classicist, and professor at Bard College. A few years ago, when he was teaching an undergraduate seminar on The Odyssey (Bookshop|Amazon) his 81-year-old father, Jay, decided to sit in on the class. Mendelsohn relates that experience and a subsequent father-son trip to retrace the Greek hero’s route through the Aegean i...

Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one version of a thing becomes the default. For example, in a thousand years, food historians might not necessarily know that a recipe c...