Before the search engine Google, there was the word googol. As mathematician Edward Kasner recounts in his book Mathematics and the Imagination, he asked his 9-year-old nephew Milton to coin a word for a huge number, specifically 10 to the 100th power, and that’s what the youngster came up with. A googly, on the other hand, is a type of bowl in cricket. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...
Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...