I am certain that my first use of the word “Harvard” was not in reference to the institution of higher education where I am presently enrolled, but rather in imitation of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers,” the Cambridge-based car mechanic hosts of the famed NPR program “Car Talk.”

Well, at least I always thought “Car Talk” was famed; I have been amazed by how few of my classmates have heard of this program that occupies the place in my heart that I imagine Dolly Parton must for most other Americans.

“Car Talk,” for the unfamiliar, was a weekend radio program that ran out of WBUR Boston for some 35 years, from 1977 until 2012, and during its run, it was among the most popular NPR productions, syndicated to affiliate stations across the nation. The brothers were always self-deprecating with regard to their ratings — if they were to be believed, a dozen listeners might be a good turnout — but by the show’s end in 2012, more than three million listeners tuned in each week.

The premise of the show is simple: phone in and ask the cappuccino-sipping grease monkeys that someone ill-advisidly lent a microphone to about whatever problem you might have with your car. Just as often, though, you could call about your husband and his wacko superstitious start-up ritual, or ask how to talk your 18-year-old son out of buying an Audi Quattro — the brothers often found themselves playing the part of family therapist.

When I walk through Harvard Square, I play in my head what is probably the most famous part of the show, when they gave the address of their repair shop to mail in letters and puzzler answers: “Write your answer on the back of a $20 bill and mail it to Car Talk Plaza, Box 3500, Hahr-vad Square, Cambridge — our fair city — MAaaa, oh-two-two-three-eight.” It gives me inordinate satisfaction that I, too, now live in “our fair city.”

Of course, these weren’t just any grease-monkeys: they were graduates of the most esteemed university in Cambridge: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As the brothers tell in a 2011 history of the show, the very first listeners were from a time when many people actually worked on their car, and so callers grasped the phone with only one hand, the other arm deep in the engine bay with a hex wrench. The show evolved away from cars, encompassing broader cultural commentary — yet all still through the automotive lens — such that, by the time it sunsetted, the New York Times described it as only “ostensibly about mechanical problems with cars.”

Andrew “Drew” J. Magliozzi ’05 — Ray’s son — was interviewed by Fifteen Minutes back in 2001, and gave an apt assessment of the Magliozzi brothers’ abilities: they were “trained in the art of BS.” Whether they knew the answer or not, by god they would give you an answer — and they were honest about their dishonesty, regularly ribbing each other for bad answers.

There is little I can write to do justice to the exact charisma of the brothers. It’s possible I was merely brainwashed at a young age by constant exposure to find their Boston-accented cynicism funny and their constant self-deprecation intimate. (If you know any “Car Talk” line, it will certainly be “Don’t drive like my brother!”)

Some incredible proportion of airtime consists merely of their laughing — a rather polarizing feature of the show. “Car Talk” seems to be cilantro. One must be born with the right gene to enjoy it, or else it is like having one’s mouth washed with soap. I hypothesize that it is a dominant allele: my dad, my older brother, and I find a great deal of enjoyment in listening to the show, but my mother, I suspect, can only muster tolerance on long car rides.

It is peculiar that I enjoy listening to “Car Talk” at all, considering that I have little automotive knowledge to speak of. (I have enough trouble replacing the tube of my bicycle tire.) Words like “master cylinder,” “timing belt,” “crankshaft” and “camshaft,” “alternator,” and “differential” are little more than abstractions in my mind, and they really might as well be made-up, for all I know.

My mechanically-attuned brother — who spends a great deal of time conducting repairs in the driveway on the 2009 Audi A4 2.0T with a six-speed manual transmission he inherited from my parents — has a quite different relationship with the Magliozzis: when he listens to “Car Talk,” he can actually play along and guess whether the caller needs new spark plugs or the problem rather lies with the ignition coils.

In “Car Talk,” I find a common canon of references with my brother: when he’s begun an explanation rich with automotive SAT vocabulary, the most helpful thing might be a “Car Talk” reference, and much of the very humor that governs the way we approach the world is informed by the banter of the Magliozzi brothers.

Answers to the weekly puzzler — only sometimes automotive in nature, and at its best, “historic, folkloric, challenging, interesting, and fun” — should be written on the back of a $20 bill, except in the summer, when the puzzler was on vacation.

Even now, when I’m home from Harvard and driving around with my dad, he’ll bring up a puzzler that he heard on a rerun the other day, and together, we’ll attack the problem.

Those puzzlers were always a way for my dad to poke my brain, to educate after Socrates.

Puzzlers that required genuine automotive knowledge were beyond me, but I thought away at others, like the Monty Hall problem (traumatizing to Stat 110: “Introduction to Probability” students, nostalgic to me) and various contrived scenarios involving behatted prisoners trapped on islands, travelers in need of an urgent haircut, and hats dropping out of rowboats into rivers that flow at a uniform velocity.

My dad, a physician-scientist, would compare the brothers’ series of questions for diagnosing a caller’s automotive trouble to a medical history. When did the problem start? Does it only happen in the morning? What sort of home-remedies have you ill-advisidly attempted? The cognate of “where does it hurt” might be, “Can you make the noise?” When the brothers reached a dead end, they might ask “What color is the car? Are the seats made of vinyl?”

“Car Talk” exists in a world where facts are uncertain and information hard to come by. There was, needless to be said, no Google for most of the show’s run, no cloying AI model that flatters you for your moronic questions — asking Click and Clack might really have been your best bet for many listeners. How nostalgic of a notion nowadays, when everyone seems obligated to pretend (seriously) to have the answers.

The brothers were fundamentally humble about their abilities. The “Stump the Chumps” segment was introduced to offer a bit of feedback on the otherwise unchecked automotive conjecture. Listeners were invited to call back in to report whether the brothers’ advice was sound, or “boooogus.” I’d like to think that sort of intellectual humility contributed to my moral education.

There is a sort of “Car Talk” philosophy, a way of being where one embraces the fact that most everybody is out for himself and cannot be trusted — most mechanics are thinking less of whether you really need new brake pads than of how they’re gonna afford their next boat payment — and yet, this is somehow worthy of a great deal of laughter.

Engine making a weird noise? Buy a better stereo. Can’t get the check engine light to go away? Get a strip of black electrical tape. Higher octane gas didn’t work? Try lower! Often, listeners face good-natured insults for their sins. Discovering that a listener has attempted to fix his own transmission is a bit like a dentist extracting from a patient that he has been sleeping with Tootsie Rolls between his molars. “You knucklehead!”

Tom, the “philosopher king” of the duo, embodied the philosophy with such aphorisms as “Do it while you’re young: you may never have another chance to do anything this stupid again” and “If money can fix it, it’s not a problem.” I have taken to calling these sayings “Car Talkisms.”

Claude J. Smith Jr. penned an article in a 1993 issue of the Popular Culture Review entitled “Healing Our Collective Auto-Angst: The Cultural Significance of ‘Car Talk,’” in which he characterizes these Car Talkisms as similar to Zen koans — ironic and not entirely wrong stress-relieving diversions from conventional thinking.

Smith argues that “Car Talk” targets an affluent audience “that tends to be college-educated but technically ignorant” and that, through a sort of jestful black humor, they ease the anxiety of ignorance that characterizes these yuppies.

“Car Talk” certainly heals a great deal of my angst about the world, this even though I haven’t a car and don’t exactly have the makings of a yuppie. Maybe listening to “Car Talk” is a bit like calling my parents (which I really don’t do nearly as often as I ought to) in that they always have all the answers. There is never to be found genuine despair about a problem in the Magliozzis, or at least nothing that cannot be cured with a less serious attitude.

Our lives could probably benefit from a bit more “Car Talk.” They have no fear of being wrong — and indeed, everyone expects they might be wrong, and yet they keep on laughing, and drivers keep on calling. That philosophy feels the exact antithesis of what seems to plague Harvard, the kind of self-absorbed stress and anxiety that drags one down into depressing, banal, and unpleasant seriousness.

I remember with uncanny distinction the moment that I learned that “Car Talk” would stop producing new episodes. There, by the sharp-cornered nightstand in my parents’ second-floor bedroom, looking down at the sloping lawn of our Connecticut home that terminated at a palisade of raspberry bushes — the very distinction of this memory is what causes me to doubt it at times, but even at six, I seemed to comprehend the significance of the moment.

Reruns, of course, still air, though it is a subject of perennial discontent in my family that the current incarnations of NPR reruns are released as biweekly half-hour episodes, thus recapping two entire cycles of New England weather complaints in only one year — weather complaints that as a part-time Cantabridgian, I now get to commiserate with.

The most visible remnant of “Car Talk” looks down on Cambridge from a third-story window at 5 John F. Kennedy Street: a “Dewy, Cheetham & Howe” in gold letters. Beginning in 1992, the site served as the “global headquarters” of “Car Talk.”

Tom Magliozzi died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2014, two years after the end of the show. I don’t know why, but this date does not live with any vividity in my memory. Ray has kept on going, distributing automotive advice — now by way of the written “Dear Car Talk” column. Tom and Ray are my Dolly Parton, a remnant of when an NPR program could unify yuppies and rural rednecks in mutual appreciation of these humble automotive gurus that just didn’t take themselves so seriously.

Before the credits, the brothers would always add this: “Well, you’ve just wasted another perfectly good hour listening to ‘Car Talk,’” before reading off a list of credits that included their “Russian chauffeur, Picov Andropov,” and the staff grammarian, “I. M. Shirley Wright.” In that spirit: well, you’ve just wasted a perfectly good few minutes reading my endpaper.

—Associate magazine editor Andrew W. Shlomchik can be reached at [email protected].