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.
A Winter Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) by Paul Anthony Jones includes some words to lift your spirits. The verb whicken involves the lengthening of days in springtime, a variant of quicken, meaning “come to life.” Another word, breard, is...
Rosalind from Montgomery, Alabama, says her mother used to scold her for acting like a starnadle fool. The more common version of this term is starnated fool, a term that appears particular to Black English, and appears in the work of such writers...
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