Because Grant still can’t get enough schoolyard rhymes, he shares one this week that goes: Three six nine / the goose drank wine / the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. Are you a lifer when it comes to children’s rhymes? This...
How do you pronounce chicanery? Do you soften the a, as in Chicano? No! This term, meaning “trickery” or “disturbance of the peace,” is etymologically unrelated to Chicano. It is, however, a linguistic relative of the name of...
Grant and his son have been loving the magazines Click, Cricket, and Ladybug. The poems, stories, and pictures are fantastic, and you don’t get the sense that it’s didactic or trying to force any lessons or morals. If you’re fond...
Ken from New Mexico measures up at 6 feet 8 inches, and he’s heard the gamut of comments tall people get, like How’s the weather up there? Sometimes he responds to How tall are you? with 5 feet 20 inches, and if anyone asks if he plays...
When wine drinkers swirl their glass and watch those streaks coming down, they say they’re looking at the legs. But the German term kirchenfenster, meaning “church windows,” makes a great substitute because of the arches of church...
Why do we call that painful leg cramp a charley horse? While no good answers are out there, we did find some pretty far-fetched ones, including a story about old night watchmen known as Charlies and their broken-down horses. But the term first pops...