Given the fact of reading mortality—-the awareness that it’s physically impossible to read all the books we’d like to—what’s the best way to choose your next book? Maryanne Wolf wrestles with modern challenges to doing so in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
In Hong Kong English, Add oil! means something like “Go on!” or “Go for it!” A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression of encouragement comes from Cantonese (加油 or gā yáu; rendered as jiāyóu from Mandarin) and draws on the...
A Green Bay Packers fan wonders why a quarterback who’s tackled is said to be sacked. The roots of the word sack as in “bag” goes back thousands of years, all the way to Akkadian, later spreading through Greek, Latin, and then to Romance and...
