Jim in Columbia, South Carolina, has noticed sportscasters’ use of the phrase on the season with reference to a period of time. This construction shows up in the sports pages as early as the 1880s, first referring to a team’s revenue and...
The slang phrase someone ate and left no crumbs means the person did something really well. In a previous call, a listener who works in theater noted the use of ate to mean “did something well,” as in they really ate that haircut! This...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle was inspired by the story of Reverend Archibald Spooner, who supposedly mixed up the initial sounds of words, getting tangled in such verbal missteps as “It is kisstomary to cuss the bride.” For...
Sara in Madison, Wisconsin, was reading an old edition of The Joy of Cooking and came across a recipe that described a cake’s ingredients as earrings for an elephant. She couldn’t discern whether the authors meant that was a good thing...
Ahmed, a native speaker of Arabic who also speaks French, wonders how he should pronounce words from those languages when speaking English. For example, should he model the pronunciation for the name of the writer Kahlil Ghibran the country of Qatar...
Charlotte from Princeton, Kentucky, wonders: What’s the difference between a spider web and a cobweb? There’s a bit of semantic differentiation between the two: A cobweb is usually an old spider web, while a spider web that’s not...