The Lives They're Living

Ben Yagoda

Profiling remarkable people who are a little more under the radar than they deserve to be. Your host is Ben Yagoda, the author, co-author, or editor of fourteen books, including "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English" (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the novel "Alias O. Henry" (Paul Dry Books, 2025). For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.

  1. Dave Barry on Roy Blount Jr.

    AUG 12

    Dave Barry on Roy Blount Jr.

    Dave Barry is an author and humorist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated column, which ran in more than 500 newspapers and was the inspiration for the TV show Dave's World. He has also written dozens of bestselling books, including Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog, the novel Swamp Story, and, most recently, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. Along with Ridley Pearson, Dave wrote the bestselling Starcatchers series of young-adult novels, one of which was adapted as the Tony-award winning Broadway play Peter and the Starcatcher. His subject is Roy Blount Jr. (pronounced "blunt"), who was raised in Decatur, Georgia, and has been writing about athletes, the South, language, movies, food, and a lot of other things for almost sixty years. He's published twenty-four books, the first of which, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load (1974), was about the Pittsburgh Steelers and was described by The New Yorker as "the best of all books about pro football," and the latest of which is Save Room for  Pie: Food, Songs, and Chewy Ruminations. He's contributed articles, essays, and other stuff to 171 different publications. Roy is a panelist on NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me; appeared frequently on A Prairie Home Companion; created and starred in a one-man show in New York, Roy Blount's Happy Hour and a Half; and wrote the screenplay for the Bill Murray movie Larger Than Life. Photo by Joan Griswold. Links Roy Blount's website. Roy's Substack. Dave Barry's website. Roy's 1984 Sports Illustrated profile of Yogi Berra. The Rock Bottom Remainders singing "Wild Thing" (Roy is in the long-sleeved white t-shirt). Video clip of Roy on the f-word (your moment of Roy Blount).

    27 min
  2. Paul Dickson

    MAY 6 · BONUS

    Paul Dickson

    This is a bonus episode because it's not in the usual format--me talking to person A about person B. For this one, I'm going directly to the subject: the prolific non-fiction writer Paul Dickson. I've been aware of and admired Dickson's work for a long time, probably not long after he set out on his own as an independent, aka freelance, writer in 1968. In time I came to think of him as my doppelganger, or me as his doppelganger, as I ended up hanging out my own shingle and writing about some of the same things he did, though nowhere near as prolifically: language, baseball, American history. All told, he has produced more than 60 non-fiction books and countless newspaper and magazine articles. The Washington Post called him "a one-man book factory" and Public Libraries magazine commented, "Paul Dickson could be called the Energizer bunny of authors …One of the amazing attributes of this prolific writer is that he can't be pigeonholed: his subject matter is always changing." A few of his recent books, all published within the past dozen years: "Words from the White House: Words and Phrases Created by Presidents of the United States""The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects""Contraband Cocktails--How America Drank When it Wasn't Supposed To""The Hidden Language of Baseball" (Expanded and Revised Edition)His newest book is "The Rise of the G.I. Army 1940-1941," the story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force.Paul Dickson's website. A final note for language nerds like Paul and me: At one point in the episode we discuss "elegant variation"--H.W. Fowler's dismissive term for creating an elaborate synonym to avoid word repetition. I mention that I made up an example to illustrate the practice--a baseball writer calling a second baseman "the fleet-footed second sacker" on second reference. And that I once Googled "fleet-footed second sacker" (in quotation marks) and found an actual use of the phrase back in the 1920s. (It was actually 1917, in the Athens [Georgia] Banner.) Well, I just repeated the exercise and found three additional uses of the phrase in newspapers, the most recent in 1961. Try it yourself!

    33 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Profiling remarkable people who are a little more under the radar than they deserve to be. Your host is Ben Yagoda, the author, co-author, or editor of fourteen books, including "Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English" (Princeton University Press, 2024) and the novel "Alias O. Henry" (Paul Dry Books, 2025). For each episode, Ben talks to someone who is an expert on and fascinated by the subject at hand.

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