If you mistype something, that’s a typo. But what do you call it when your voice-to-text program mistypes as you’re dictating? Is that a mico, as in microphone? Plus, the word sycophant has a long and surprising history that goes all the way back to...
Gossip goes by many names: the poop, the scoop, the lowdown, the dope, the scuttlebutt, the 411, the grapes, the gore, and hot tea. Plus, John Donne’s love poems are among the greatest in the English language, even as they’re famously...
Martha from Tallahassee, Florida, remembers hearing older relatives announce they were going for their constitutional, a term that traces back to Latin constitutio, meaning “character,” “disposition,” “nature,” or “the essence of a thing.” Its...
Tom Harris from Bluebell, Pennsylvania, wonders: In baseball, when a batter is said to take a ball, what exactly does take mean in that context? Batters have been advised to take a ball since the mid-1850s, when rule changes established the modern...
Lisa from Paris, Kentucky, grew up eating a German Christmas cookie at a friend’s house in Miami, Florida. This deep-fried, bow-tie-shaped pastry was made with butter, lemon, and rum, and dusted with powdered sugar. The family called them...
Daniel Mendelsohn is a widely acclaimed author, critic, classicist, and professor at Bard College. A few years ago, when he was teaching an undergraduate seminar on The Odyssey (Bookshop|Amazon) his 81-year-old father, Jay, decided to sit in on the...