Radio Sweethearts

I suppose that after months of hosting the show solo, Bob deserves a break. Brooke’s hosting and editing the show this week (and delivering her own outro without a single trace of longing for Bob – seems that all of that attempted hair petting on his part is getting him absolutely nowhere).

Listening to this week’s show, I had a realization about my listening habits. Actually, it could be OTM’s show formatting. It occurred to me that I rarely pay attention to the first and second story. It seems like the show front loads all of their super topical newsy stories and leans towards feature stories as the show progresses. Is that just me? Do y’all hear that, too?

This week, it took me until the story about the U.S.’s first internet addiction clinic (the appropriately named Restart) to start really getting into the show.

The two standout stories for the week were the last two, which were both about language. One was about a new version of the New International Version Bible that changes all of those pesky uses of “man” to “human beings” and changes God to a “they” rather than a “He”, a move that apparently made a lot of people angry. Personally, I like it. The excerpts that were read on the show made me a lot less stabby than other translations that assume that men are the example gender.

The second story was about the evolution of the dictionary. Apparently, old ye dictionaries didn’t include obscenities. Also, I can’t believe  I didn’t know about Merriam-Webster’s open source dictionary. The open source dictionary includes a lot of words that will likely never make it into the real thing (malvertising, frugalista, ambisextrous). I give 10 points to whichever NPR reporter uses “ambisextrous” first. Place your bets on who that will be in the comments.

This recap was written by Kerry. Matthew was absent (much like Bob), which meant that instead of having someone staring at me all moon-eyed and plucking lint from my sweater, I got to concentrate on listening to the show and writing this recap. The downside is that my sweater is still linty.