What sort of language is worthy of being inscribed in stone? A frieze on the James A. Farley Building in New York City is inscribed with Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their...
A South Carolina teen calls to ask why the English language has a word meaning “to throw someone out of a window,” but no word for “the day after tomorrow.” The word defenestrate, from Latin fenestra, “window,”...
The director of Common Voices Chorus, a women’s choir in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, seeks a word to denote what her group does when they get together to sing simply for the joy of singing and community-building, rather than working toward the...
The Rockefeller State Park Preserve near Pleasantville, New York, features a fine example of a glacial erratic, a giant rock left behind thousands of years ago by a glacier as it moved. In this case, the word erratic functions as a noun. Both the...
Anthony in Tallahassee, Florida, shares a favorite Italian saying, Mal comune mezzo gaudio, similar in meaning to the English proverb Troubles shared are trouble halved. The mezzo means “half,” as in mezzo soprano, and the gaudio, or...
Mike in Jacksonville, Florida, is curious about the phrase There’s no use in keeping the dogs and doing the barking yourself. His dad would use it when delegating a chore to one of his kids. As early as the 1500s, the proverb Don’t keep...