Linda in Salisbury, North Carolina, wonders why boxing is called the sweet science, since there’s nothing obviously sweet about a bruising sport. This term took hold among British sportswriters in the early 19th century as promoters tried to frame boxing as a disciplined craft rather than mere brawling. The expression is closely associated with the journalist Pierce Egan, whose writings collected in Boxiana (Bookshop|Amazon) helped circulate the phrase sweet science of bruising and presented boxing as something governed by observation—timing, distance, footwork, and tactical judgment. Later, A. J. Liebling’s essays for The New Yorker, collected as The Sweet Science (Bookshop|Amazon) in 1956, gave the term a second life in American writing, emphasizing precision and intelligence while still acknowledging the sport’s mix of elegance and roughness. This is part of a complete episode.
The first person on your street to put out the trash and recycling? That’s your street’s binfluencer, a combination of bin and influencer. In the UK, this term is sometimes used to denote someone who encourages recycling and waste reduction. In the...
Do you refer to nighttime sleepwear as jammies, jommies, or something else? A Nashville, Tennessee, woman says that her family referred to pajamas as jommies, while her husband’s family always called them jammies. Although jammies is the far more...
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