The Thought Plickens (rebroadcast) - 3 Jan. 2010

<p>[This episode first aired February 6, 2010.]<br /><br />If you're inappropriately focused on the minutiae of a project instead of the bigger picture, you're said to be "bike-shedding." Grant talks about that modern slang term and Martha discusses a word that goes way back in time, right back to "In the beginning," in fact. The word is "tohubohu," and it means a "mess" or "confusion."<br /><br />Grant and Martha discuss a new term, "bike-shedding," and an old one, "tohubohu."<br /><br />Where'd we get the term "swan song"? A caller says this expression came up in conversation just before her retirement and she wonders about its origin. <br /><br />Martha reads email from listeners suggesting alternatives to the word retirement.<br /><br />Is the word "criteria" singular or plural? <br /><br />Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle is about phrases that suggest a pair of words that are spelled alike, except that in one of them, a letter is doubled. Try to guess the two nearly identical words suggested by this phrase: "Wagered on a root vegetable." <br /><br />It's likely America's greatest linguistic export: "O.K." A caller raised in the Philippines is curious about its origin. The hosts give him an answer, and also point out a familiar word in English that derives from the caller's native language, Tagalog.<br /><br />When is it more appropriate to use the word female as opposed to woman?<br /><br />David Pogue http://www.davidpogue.com/, technology columnist for the New York Times, grapples with a slang quiz. First he shares own his favorite slang term, "nonversation," then tries to guess the meaning of the archaic technological slang terms "planktonocrit," "phenakistoscope," and "sphygmograph."<br /><br />What's the correct pronunciation of crayon? Is it cray-on? Cran? Crown? Here's a dialect survey map http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_9.html that shows the distribution of these pronunciations.<br /><br />A Green Bay, Wisconsin, caller is curious about her mother's playful interjections. If s