Grant’s 7-year-old son has gotten into Ancient Greek, of all things. While it’s a joy to teach your kids interesting things, a child’s eagerness to learn also poses a challenge for parents. You don’t want to squelch their...
The part of a church known as a foyer, vestibule, or lobby is sometimes called the narthex. This word appears to go back to the ancient Greek term for “fennel,” although beyond that, its etymology is unclear. This is part of a complete...
A calliope — that organ often found on steamboats or at circuses — ends like Penelope, not cantaloupe. The word originally comes from the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry, though the sound of a calliope today is associated more with carnival...
Well, look what the cat dragged in! It’s another newsletter from A Way with Words. Given how often we talk about food words, we should write a cookbook. For example, this past weekend’s show was a leftover — a rebroadcast, a rerun, a re...
Antimetabole, from Greek words meaning “turning about in the opposite direction,” is the rhetorical turn in “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” where the same words come back in reverse order. Bascom in Redding, California, collects...
O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Andrew in Dallas enjoys oxymorons, expressions that yoke contradictory ideas into a single phrase. The word oxymoron is from Greek for “pointedly foolish,” and everyday...