Some countries have strict laws about naming babies. New Zealand authorities, for example, denied a request to name some twins Fish and Chips. • Halley’s Comet seen centuries before English astronomer Edmund Halley ever spotted it...
A grandmother in Ferndale, California, wonders about a phrase her own grandmother used. If one of the grandchildren walked into a room and joined a conversation already taking place, she’d exclaim, “Oh! Another country heard from!”...
Kyarn, also spelled cyarn, is an Appalachian and Ozark dialect form of carrion, dead or rotting flesh. Jennifer, calling from the public library in Chowan County, North Carolina, heard it from her father, who grew up in eastern Kentucky, in phrases...
An antigram is a variety of anagram, in which the letters of one word are rearranged to create its opposite. Examples of antigrams include united and untied, and the word forty-five, which anagrams to over fifty. This is part of a complete episode...
Author Stephen King’s book On Writing is an excellent guide to the craft. In it, he warns that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Much other writing advice also says to cut adverbs, and even adjectives. But is that truly...
Stigler’s Law states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer, and the same pattern shows up in other eponyms. Venn diagrams were popularized by John Venn in the 1880s, but Leonard Euler had introduced similar diagrams...