This week on Unorthodox: Miley meets Woody.
Our Jewish guest is word maven Lizzie Skurnick, author of the memoir Shelf Discovery and That Should Be a Word, a clever compendium based on her long-running New York Times Magazine column of the same name. In 2013 she founded Lizzie Skurnick Books, which reissues classic young adult literature, including the All-of-a-Kind Family series from the 1950s. She tells us about her latest project, a crowd-sourced effort to find more interesting versions of expressions we commonly use: Instead of “buzz off,” say, she offers the colorful Yiddish phrase “may you live in a mansion with 100 rooms and drop dead in every one of them.” She welcomes suggestions via Twitter.