2022-05-04
16 分钟Coming up on Word Matters, Corrections, Clarifications, and Grave Transcrations.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea, Peter Sakalowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
A visit to the mailbag provides us with the sartorial use of hipster and some schooling on 19th century locomotive technology.
Listeners will occasionally write us letters with questions, sometimes clarifications,
et cetera, about recent episodes of our podcast.
And if you do and you have a question,
we are always happy to entertain the question and answer it if we can.
But today we'd like to kind of shift the focus to a slightly Different kind of listener response and this is a new section of answering mailbag questions that we are going to call mistakes were made in which people have pointed out errors that we have made and We do in fact make mistakes and thank you to anybody who draws our attention to them But recently several people wrote to us about our explanation of jerk water in which we refer to the water in jerk water as a means of cooling steam locomotives A number of you wrote in to point out reasonably enough that water is not used to cool steam locomotives so much
as it is used as a fuel for them by means of boiling that water.
And so when we explained that jerk water towns are trains that stop at little towns to cool their engines with water,
we were certainly in error.
And Peter, we actually had some content written about that, didn't we?
Yeah, there's a wonderful little paragraph at the entry for jerkwater,
and that's what I love about the online dictionary.
When it first came out,
there was a lot of worry that the sort of romance of dictionaries was going away,
that the online dictionaries were sterile.