Responding to our discussion about thin places, those spots where the boundary between this world and other realities seems narrow or permeable, a listener in Kirkland, Washington, sent us some eloquent thoughts about her own experiences of that sensation. She’s a librarian at The Overlake School in nearby Redmond, Washington, and has since elaborated on those thoughts and posted them on the school library’s website. 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...
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