Crash Blossoms: When Words Collide (rebroadcast) - 5 July 2010

<p>[This episode first aired December 12, 2009.]<br /><br />This week, it's headlines that make you do a doubletake, like "Child's Stool Great for Use in Garden." Martha and Grant discuss a few of these bloopers, also known as "crash blossoms." Also, if you "unthaw" something, are you freezing it or unfreezing it? Do hotcakes really sell that fast? What's the likelihood of getting people to use a new gender-neutral pronoun? And Grant shares the story behind the term "knucklehead."<br /><br />Some call them "crash blossoms", those funny turns of phrase that copy editors may or may not intend, like "Milk Drinkers Turn To Powder." More about crash blossoms in this article in "Good" by Mark Peters http://www.good.is/post/confusion-caused-by-crash-blossoms/.<br /><br />Where'd we get the expression they're "selling like hotcakes"?<br /><br />A Pensacola man says he's invented a gender-neutral pronoun, and wants to know how to popularize it. He's not the first to try, as shown by linguist Dennis Baron's chronology of failed attempts to create and popularize epicene pronouns.<br /><br />http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm<br /><br />If a recipe calls for "unthawed" corn, is that corn supposed to be frozen or unfrozen?<br /><br />Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz called "Scronsonants." The object is to guess two-word phrases containing a pair of words starting with the same three consonants. Here's one: "I get a particular joy from the pain of others, but I had to learn how to do it. So I attended ___________."<br /><br />A Texas listener says her infant daughter is soothed by white noise. She's curious as to why it's called white noise instead of gray noise.<br /><br />"You "knucklehead"!" Where'd we get an epithet like that? Grant tells the story about the wartime cartoon that helped popularize the term. Check out the adventures of R.F. Knucklehead in "LIFE" magazine.<br /><br />http://tinyurl.com/yd4zoou<br /><br />More about cartoons used for war-time education:<br /><br />http