Zig-Zag and Shilly-Shally (Rebroadcast) - 29 Nov. 2010

[This episode first aired October 24, 2009.]

Bavarian Chalet. Mushroom Basket. Moose Point. Who in the heck comes up with the names of paints, anyway? Martha and Grant ponder that mystery. They also explain why those annoying emails go by the name "spam." And Grant explains the difference between being "adorbs" and "bobo."

Bavarian Chalet. Mushroom Basket. Moose Point. Who in the heck comes up with the names of paint, anyway? Must be the same people who get paid to give names like Love Child, Sellout, and Apocalypse to shades of lipstick. Martha and Grant discuss wacky color names.

Hurly-burly, helter-skelter, zigzag, shilly-shally -- the hosts dish out some claptrap about words like these, otherwise known as "reduplications" or "rhyming jingles."

If someone's "naked as a needle," just how naked are they? Why "needle"?

Grant and Martha discuss more goofy names for lipstick. Mauvelous Memories, anyone?

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's latest puzzle requires players to guess the last word in a two-line verse. For example: "He’s seven feet tall and big as a tank, The meanest Marine that you’ve ever BLANK." (Stumped? Take a letter out of "seven.")

An Episcopal priest in Toledo worries that her sermons are cluttered with dashes. This works just fine when she's preaching, but when the same text appears on her church's website, it looks like a messy tangle of words and punctuation. The hosts discuss the differences between text written for oral delivery, and text written to be read silently.

Why is that annoying stuff in your email box called "spam? Grant has the answer. Here's the Monty Python skit that inspired it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE&feature=player_embedded

Can a first-time event ever be called "The First Annual" Such-and-Such? Members of a Cedar Rapids group planning a social mixer disagree.

Is that snazzy new car "adorbs" or "bobo"? Grant talks about adorbs, bobo, and a few other slang terms collected by Professor Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Theories about how Latin Americans came to use the term "gringo" as a disparaging word for foreigners. We can easily rule out the one about the song "Green Grow the Lilacs," but what about the rest?

An insurance fraud investigator in Milwaukee wonders if he's correct to use a semicolon immediately after the word "however." Grant suggests that the word and the punctuation mark should do a do-si-do.

Many of us learned the rule about using the preposition "between" when talking about two items, but among when talking about more than two. In reality, though, the rule is a little more complicated.

Someone who's extremely busy may be said to be "busier than a cranberry merchant." What is it that keeps cranberry merchants so busy, anyway?

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