A 23-year-old says that since her 75-year-old dad has now retired, he’s finally ready to learn to text and share memes. What’s the best way to introduce him to the world of social media and communicating with graphics? There are several helpful strategies: Show him how to find and send animated GIFs to express a particular emotion. Help him set up an Instagram account and follow some other users who post about topics he likes, and encourage him to share images he finds interesting, so their communication isn’t just one-way. Send him memes based on the pop culture he knows — television shows from the 1970s, for example — and show him how to search the database at Know Your Meme so he can learn about the ones he doesn’t understand. This is part of a complete episode.
The cardboard cylinder left after the last sheet of toilet, tissue, or wrapping paper comes off the roll has inspired families to make up a lot of names for the tube or the sounds you can make with it. These include oh-ah, oh-ah, drit-drit, dah-dah...
A native Texan says his Canadian wife teases him about his use of hitten for a past participle, as in You have hitten every green light instead of You have hit every green light. Charles Mackay’s 1888 work, A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch, does...
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