On this rebroadcast of The Pulse: Who are you? There are dozens of ways to answer that question, from your name and nationality, to your relationships and job, all the way down to the nature of your soul. But the more we zoom in, the more the self can feel like an impressionist painting — from afar, you see distinct shapes, but the closer you look, the more it dissolves into a million tiny pieces. So what is the self, really? What is it that makes us who we are? On this week’s episode, we explore what scientists are learning about the concept of the “self,” and how deep it truly runs. We hear stories about the eroding effects of Alzheimer’s — and whether our memories make us who we are; what diaries can tell us about our best and worst selves; and what it really means to be self-aware.

An lovely evening of classical music at San Diego's new Rady Shell at Jacobs Park leads to a conversation with an audio engineer about the term cocktail party effect, referring to the brain's ability to focus in on the sound of one conversation despite being in a crowded room of people all talking to each other. 


Paul from Omaha, Nebraska, says as a result of watching the College World Series in that city, he and his son wondered when sports announcers started using the word cheese to describe a pitcher's fastball, and such variants as throwing cheese, hard cheese, and high cheese. It likely derives from a word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi that sounds like the word cheese, that means a "thing" or "item," which migrated into British English as the big cheese, meaning "the big thing" or "the main thing." In the same way that the word stuff, meaning the quality of a pitcher's throwing. The best and most comprehensive reference work for the language of baseball is The Dickson Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson. (Bookshop|Amazon)


Piper from Reno, Nevada, wonders why a movie trailer is called a trailer when it comes at the beginning of a film. Isn't a trailer something that follows something else?


A Simi Valley, California, listener writes to ask if any other families use the term shaky cheese for "Parmesan cheese shaken out of a can." Indeed they do, and other families apply the term scrapey cheese to "cheese scraped over a dish of food."


Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle features sentences that include a short word that anagrams to another word, and is defined by yet another word in the sentence. For example, if the clue is I can get no research done because the room is so dusty, what's the anagram, and what's the definition?


Mia from Iowa City, Iowa, says she and her fiance disagree about the intensity of meaning in the words bummed and bummer. Does the term to bum someone out refer to "being a source of mild aggravation" or does it imply something closer to "leaving one feeling devastated"?


The English adjective fastuous comes from Latin fastuosus, meaning "proud or haughty," and applies to someone who is "characterized by excessive pride, vanity, or self-importance." Fastuosity refers to "an ostentatious show of wealth."


Robert in Oak Park, Illinois, seeks a Portuguese phrase he once heard that a man might say when the object of his affection is out of their league or otherwise forever unattainable. This wistful phrase is Ela é muita areia pro meu caminhãozinho or "She's too much sand for my little truck." This sentiment is expressed throughout the world in various ways. A Spanish phrase suggests that the speaker doesn't even come up to someone else's heels -- ni a los talones -- and in French it's loin de lui arriver à la cheville. In German, it's nicht das Wasser reichen können, literally "can't reach the water," that is, not good enough to carry water for someone. In Polish, a couple of expressions that also convey the idea of someone being out of another's league translate as "The sausage is not for the dog" and the "The soul wants to get into heaven."


Gail in San Diego, California, wonders what's happening to past tense of verbs. She's observed more uses of I could have went instead of I could have gone, and something had sunken instead of sank, and I was sat rather than I was seated, and I was drugged when she would expect to hear I was dragged.


If someone ever asks you how you are, you’re feeling on top of the world, you can say Alles im Butter. It's German for "Everything's great" -- literally, "All is in butter."


In anatomical nomenclature, a bursa is a fluid-filled sac that helps cushion a joint. Bursa is the Latin word for "purse," the source of English purse itself, as well as the bursar who controls the purse strings in a college, plus disburse meaning "to release funds," and reimburse, "to pay back." In France, the related term Bourse was applied to the French stock exchange. Next to your knee is a bursa called the pes anserinus, which means "goose foot" in Latin, a reference to the way tendons from three different leg muscles attach to the shin bone there, then spread out in three directions like a webbed goose's foot. Pes in Latin means "foot," and its genitive form pedis is the source of such English words as pedestrian and pedal. Anser in Latin means "goose," and anserinus means "gooselike," from which we get the English adjective anserine, which describes something "silly or stupid as a goose." In German, Gänsefüßchen, "little goose feet," is a slang term for "quotation marks." Another English word inspired by a bird's foot is pedigree, from French pied de grue, or "foot of the crane," recalling the shape of the forked lines in a genealogical chart.


A university professor in Baltimore, Maryland, catches himself pronouncing the very same word in different ways depending on the context in which he's speaking. For him, it occurs with the word innovative, which U.S. and U.K. speakers pronounce differently. It's not uncommon to have inconsistencies in one's own pronunciation, especially if you're in a collaborative work environment where you may be influenced by the way others pronounce a word, or by particular phrases that keep popping up again and again.


In response to our conversation about using the term bedroom suite to denote a collection of furniture, Judith in Glen Rose, Texas, shares a hilarious story about when her Pennsylvania-born beau misunderstood what she meant when she told him she bought a $600  bedroom suit.


Charlie in Lexington, Kentucky, says his wife, who's from the eastern part of the state, uses a peculiar phrase to indicate that something's not her responsibility: Not my circus, not my monkeys. This dismissive saying is at least 30 years old, and is a calque, or exact translation, of a Polish phrase that Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. English speakers elaborated on the expression, with several other versions such as Not my circus, not my monkeys, but the clowns definitely know me. Other versions: Not my money, not my business and Not my pig, not my farm.


A wonderful phrase from the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Bookshop|Amazon), edited by Michael Montgomery and Jennifer Heinmiller, is in all my put-togethers, meaning "in all my accumulated experience."


This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, songs not so serious, both modern and traditional, performed by various artists recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park.  Folk music is often thought of as being either dark and serious or naive and childish.  Not so with this collection of artists and songs.  In this episode, explore with us a lighter side of folk.  Featured on this episode are a variety of artists including Antsy McClain, the Buffalo Gals, Bill & the Belles, Muriel Anderson, David Holt & Josh Goforth, Mike Snider, Jimmy Driftwood, the Hogslop Stringband, and Jerron Paxton.  We’ll hear their most humorous songs, both traditional and modern, many of them written by the artists themselves. 

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator, and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1979 archival recording of Ozark original Kenneth Rorie performing the traditional song “In the Pines,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

In this week’s guest host segment, renowned traditional folk musician, writer, and step dancer Aubrey Atwater discusses traditional songs that are unmetered & crooked and do not fit into our common ideas about rhythm.  Hear Aubrey as she dares us to try and dance to these crooked tunes.

An experiment rode next to Richard Branson when he rocketed to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo last month. Planetary scientist Alan Stern says we’ve begun a new era of affordable space research thanks to this vehicle and Blue Origin’s New Shepard. Then it’s Olympic gold for Bruce Betts in our weekly What’s Up segment.  Hear and discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/alan-stern-suborbital-science-new-horizons-update

This week on the show: As The Netherlands desperately tries to reduce its nitrogen emissions, Dutch farmers are up in arms about what that will mean for them. Melting glaciers on Mt Kilimanjaro cause drastic changes in Kenya and Tanzania. And the moment the most elusive wild cat in the world was spotted for the first time in a decade in Algeria.

ClassicalWorks (Episode 018)

That blood-red full moon of July looked for sure to be on fire, but only because we saw it through smoke that had drifted thousands of miles east across North America. We’re sorting through glimpses of an apocalypse this hour, reaching for the eerie, uncanny feel of this climate summer of ’21: oceanic flooding in German cities, and now inland China, too. Our listening post is New Orleans, favorite American river town and all-important port that’s dissolving as we speak, same time it’s caught in the jaws of a rebounding pandemic. Louisiana this summer has the highest per capita increase in COVID cases and the third lowest vaccine rate in the country.  It’s embattled but not quite hopeless, knowing it’s alive because it’s scared half to death.

The city of New Orleans, Louisiana, could seem to “get” climate change better than Boston, say, or New York, or Los Angeles. The New Orleans question is not whether global warming is real, or coming soon. In New Orleans the tipping point is history, and not to be undone. The question is how to cope with the next climate, and the answers can be imaginative and bold. That is the drift of Nathaniel Rich’s curious book, titled Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade, about a variety of people already living in the next place. Some—like the celebrated historian John Barry—have found new identities battling to make the next climate more democratic than the last one. Nathaniel Rich comes first with a keynote thought: that he was moving forward in the climate story when he planted his young family in old New Orleans. 

Even with the impact of the coronavirus on music life in Germany, we've been able to fill most of the programs with fresh concert recordings. But this time we're taking a look back at Deutsche Welle's two decade-long year media partnership with the Beethovenfest in Bonn. In a "Best of the Beethovenfest," Beethoven, Haydn, Franck and Bruckner are brought to life by Harnoncourt, Dudamel, Brendel, Rattle, Masur and Norrington.