The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (Bookshop|Amazon) by Patrik Svensson, translated by Agnes Broome won Sweden’s highest literary prize. Although Svensson himself has described this volume as a “strange and nerdy” book, it’s a fascinating combination of science, folklore, metaphysics, and personal memoir. But don’t go looking for information about electric eels, also known as Electrophorus electricus and knifefish. That’s an entirely different species. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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