Radio Show _A Way With Words_--Aren't they just looking up stuff online?

Cafe Society
1

I heard this radio show on NPR today, A Way With Words. It’s a call in show where callers ask the hosts questions about etymology, grammar, odd phrases they’ve heard, things like that.

Anyone heard this show?

I am fairly certain that those two hosts are just sitting in there with laptops looking up the answers online, like at etymology.com or Wikipedia. Granted, both have written books on the kinds of topics discussed on the show. But if you listen to what happens when people call, it’s always the same. Several seconds of hemming and hawing and chit-chatting, asking for more details and so on, and then, snap! They start naming citations of usage and listing long detailed accounts of the histories of word usages and so on. It’s that “snap” moment that makes me suspicious. There’s no slow recall as they bring the phrase to mind from memory. It’s just one second, they have no idea what the caller is talking about, and the very next second, bam, they know everything.

I’m pretty sure they’re just looking it up online on the spot!

But has anyone heard the show? What do you think?

2

No, I’m pretty sure that’s not “just” what they’re doing. They may use the internet but probably also physical resources - various dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopedias.
The internet’s great, but they answer some complicated queries using mostly their background knowledge and their researching skills.
try an experiment - you try to answer those questions as quickly just using your laptop.
I work in a high school library & we try every day to teach the students that the internet isn’t the only way to research. Many questions don’t have one-word or one-web-link answers.