Name: Counting (age 2) by Lauren Hall-Lew
Duration: 15 s
Description: My son counting to "eleventeen" at 35 months old.

Since the 13th century, the adjective wicked has meant "bad" or "evil." So why do people in New England use wicked as an intensifying adverb to mean "very" or "extremely"? http://waywordradio.org

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Steven from San Antonio, Texas, seeks a word that means "the opposite of trauma." Perhaps eustress, literally "good stress"? Or harmonization? Placid? Is there a better term for this? http://waywordradio.org

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4-55 air conditioning is a slang term for cooling a car by driving at a high rate of speed with all the windows down. http://waywordradio.org

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The haunting new novel Clear (Bookshop|Amazon) by Carys Davies is set amid the Scottish Clearances of the 19th century, a relentless program of forced evictions that drove whole communities of tenant farmers off the land. The story concerns a Scotsman who struggles to communicate with one of the last speakers of Norn, a language of the Shetland Islands. The book includes a glossary of Norn words, such as leura, the “short, unreliable quiet between storms," gruggy for "threatening weather," and skump for "a fog bank." http://waywordradio.org

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Quiz Guy John Chaneski is back with another "Take-Off" game in which the object is to take one letter from a word suggested by a clue to form another word. In this case, the letter that's to be taken off will always be an initial R. For example, what two words are suggested by the sentence He's a star pitcher, but he really can't run that fast? http://waywordradio.org

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How did the term Bohemian come to be associated with literary and artistic nonconformists who live outside mainstream society? In the early 19th century, the French term La bohème was applied to the Romani people, also known as the Roma, a traditionally itinerant people who originated in Northern India, and who arrived in France via Bohemia, now part of the modern Czech Republic. The 1851 book Scènes de la vie de bohème or Scenes of Bohemian Life (Bookshop|Amazon) romanticized the life of an impoverished seamstress and her artist friends, and inspired Giacomo Puccini's opera La bohème, which in turn helped inspire the modern musical RENT and its show-stopping number La vie bohème. http://waywordradio.org

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While reading Great Expectations (Bookshop|Amazon) by Charles Dickens, a listener in Arlington, Texas, is surprised when one of the characters inherits some money, which Dickens describes as a cool four thousand. Were they really using cool that way back then? When used to describe large quantities of money, cool emphasizes that this impressive number totals at least that amount. http://waywordradio.org

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Rich, an audiobook narrator from Tucson, Arizona, wonders how lexicographers decide which pronunciations are preferred. He specifically wonders about pronouncing the word aioli. http://waywordradio.org

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Given the fact of reading mortality--the awareness that it's physically impossible to read all the books we'd like to--what's the best way to choose your next book? Maryanne Wolf wrestles with modern challenges to doing so in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Bookshop|Amazon). http://waywordradio.org

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My son counting to "eleventeen" at 35 months old.

Counting (age 2)

Lauren Hall-Lew

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