The Fifth Hour: Wicked Pissah

"Twenty years. In radio, that's roughly six generations." Ben Maller opens his Saturday broadcast with an encounter that sounds mundane—running into a former coworker in the hallway—but becomes something stranger and more revealing. The coworker, Garrett Rick, hadn't worked at Fox Sports Radio in nearly two decades. Yet there he was, back in the same building where Maller still hosts his overnight show, a ghost from an earlier era of the network. That brief hallway conversation becomes the organizing thread for an episode that is less an interview and more a meditation on time, memory, and the peculiar anthropology of radio.

The word of the week and the geography of identity

Before the hallway encounter, Maller establishes a motif. The word of the week is "wicked," the New England intensifier meaning "very" or "extremely." He traces its origins to early twentieth-century Massachusetts Puritan language, notes a Harvard study confirming it remains a strong marker of regional identity across generations, and cites Boston University research showing college students use it more frequently than their parents. "It's actually considered not just slang," Maller says. "It's higher level than slaying." The word is a regional dialect feature that has crossed over into cultural roots, reinforced by movies like Good Will Hunting and The Departed. This is not idle trivia. The word