An Ear For Wine (Rebroadcast) - 4 January 2016

<p>This week on "A Way with Words": Creative communication in a noisy world! Writing a clever 140-character tweet isn't easy. But you know what's even more impressive? Working all 26 letters of the alphabet into just one sentence! The term for that type of sentence is pangram. Naturally, there's a whole Twitter feed featuring accidental pangrams from all over. And: More people are giving themselves coffee names to avoid confusion when ordering that cup to go. After all, what barista is going to misspell Elvis? And what's the difference between a purse, a handbag, and a pocketbook? Martha and Grant root around for an answer. Plus: center vs. centre, capital vs. lowercase letters, the origin of sommelier, and an alternative to showering when travelling in an RV.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />The disgruntled consumer who tweeted My "prize" in my Cracker Jack box...whoever does quality control needs to get fired accidentally did something miraculous. This message includes all 26 letters of the alphabet, making it a pangram. The twitter feed @PangramTweets shares random pangrams from around the internet.<br /><br />A wine expert with a bachelor's degree in linguistics and a minor in French wonders about the origin of the term sommelier. It shares a root with sumpter, meaning "pack animal." Sommelier used to refer generally to the person in charge of the provisions carried by a pack animal, and later came to specify the person who oversees the provisions in a wine cellar.<br /><br />"The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed," writes Rebecca Solnit in The Faraway Nearby. As Solnit observes, it's true that a book is just an inert object on a shelf that takes on a new life when opened: "A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another."<br /><br /><br />Many people pronounce the word groceries as if it were spelled grosheries. The more common pronunciation, though, is the sibilant GROSS-er-reez.<br /><br />Someone setting out to write a pangram drafted t