A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over

I’ve been listening to this show for well over a decade and it’s entertaining and informative. Great show.

A Way With Words is the perfect weekend companion. Heard it on the radio and happy to see it available as a podcast as well.

Excellent podcast! Martha and Grant are so warm and welcoming. Their approach puts me in the perfect head space to simultaneously relax and learn. I love how accepting they are of different pronunciations and usages while still clarifying accepted rules and conventions; I am now far less harsh in my criticism of other people. I believe I have listened to every episode available via podcast, and I will continue listening as long as it keeps coming out!

The host are incredibly friendly, and so incredibly enthusiastic about words! Each episode has a few little offerings of different new stories, or book releases, or something pertaining to the world of words, and then most of the rest of the show is responding to calls or emails either about word meaning disputes, derivation origin questions or usage queries. Every episode also has a really excellent puzzle. That is often easy enough to do in real time while you’re listening, but almost always gets increasingly harder so that you can’t quite keep up with it. But because the host play the puzzle live it’s something you can sort of play against them, the flow of the show is that they come from the polite culture where you keep saying buy it at the end of the call until someone gives up and since I come from a culture where you say goodbye once it’s agonizing to me to listen to everyone to jockey for final, bye-bye position