In which I cover “Silly Sounding Words”. The terms are: boondoggle, widget, succotash, finagled, jabberwocky, cockamamie, balderdash, hornswoggle, wonky, and blatherskite.

In retrospect, perhaps not as silly as they could have been but an interesting bunch nonetheless!

The first true episode of Ten Terms! In which I cover words relating to “beginnings” or “introductions.” These words are: inchoate, antediluvian, incipient, gambit, terminus a quo, protasis, proem, prelude, incunabula, bestir

In future, the “show notes” will be more advanced than these but I just wanted to get going quickly. I’m currently working with the Wordnik API to help me produce something more complete and useful.

Welcome to episode 0 of Ten Terms, a new topic English language vocabulary podcast. Why start at 0? Because this is merely an introductory show to explain what the following episodes are all about.

I’ve always loved getting a grasp on the meanings and etymology of words and phrase. It wasn’t until recently, though, when I heard the “Words” episode of the famous Radiolab podcast that I discovered how special words are not only to English geeks like me, but to everyone’s understanding of the world. They looked people who had no concept of words relating to objects and the difference that made to their lives. They looked at how words change our comprehension of physical spaces and how our sense of spatial awareness is thrown into disarray when our internal monologue is silenced.

Words, then, are important. Learning vocabulary shouldn’t merely be the pursuit of the English geek but of anyone who wants to get a deeper sense of what reality is or, at least, a deeper sense of how to recognize things in our world. With words comes understanding; with an extended vocabulary comes nuance.

I haven’t set a schedule yet, but in each episode of Ten Terms I’ll be taking ten different but loosely related terms and covering each with a minute on each at most. I’ll give a definition, some examples, and, in many cases, a little background to the word’s origin, some quirky story, or any sort of trivia I can come up with. I’ve listened to several other vocabulary podcasts and I’ve had a couple of issues that I hope I’ll be addressing with Ten Terms. First, is that many are either too short or two long. One word per podcast gets a bit tiring but so does 50. And a mere 10 seconds spent on a definition read from the dictionary isn’t any good for remembering the words. Nor is picking out random words and presenting them together. So I’ll be aiming to be entertaining, relevant, but comprehensive in my coverage.