A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over · Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett. Produced by Stefanie Levine.

Cat Bristle - 15 September 2025

·54 min·5 clips

Discover how influencers use rising tones to hook you and keep you watching their videos.

The accent arrives first. Martha tries on a lifestyle influencer accent, full of rising tones and little verbal lifts that keep the listener waiting for the next bit. Grant hears a floor-holding move, the kind of sound that helps someone keep attention on TikTok and YouTube. Then the lines knot up. A caller's workplace word, wuzzle, names kinked tangles that can damage lines or instruments. Grant traces it at least to the mid-19th century, when to wuzzle meant to jumble or confuse. Nice little word, honestly. It fits lines, Ethernet cords, ropes, and any coil that refuses to behave. It also carries a boozy haze: the older verb could mean muddling someone's brain, especially with alcohol, while the caller's example lives in a technical workplace. Grant and Martha sound pleased to let it wander. Then Greg Johnson changes the problem. He wants to know when late at night becomes early in the morning, and midnight feels too neat. The proposed border gets silly fast. A friend says 2:30 a.m. still counts as night, while quarter to three is morning for sure. Martha keeps turning the question around. Grant points to dawn, dusk, and the sun, then thinks about the moon and other languages. The answer never fully settles, which is part of the charm. Credits, the toll-free line, and the nonprofit signoff leave the call-in door open for the next language puzzle.

As heard by us

A breezy tour of speech quirks, timing, and the old verb wuzzle.

A Way with Words starts from a simple listener question about when late at night tips into early morning, then widens into a breezy look at how speech changes online and off.

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Why you'd press play

Language puzzles, from influencer intonation to the strange, useful verb wuzzle.

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