Long before Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House on the Prairie (Bookshop|Amazon), she worked as a journalist, chronicling life in the Ozarks. In one of her early writings, Wilder refers to what she calls “the famous question”: How old is Anne? A footnote in the text indicates that the question, How old is Anne? simply means “Who knows?” It turns out there’s a funny story behind that rhetorical question. It referred to a math puzzle published in a 1903 newspaper, which caused no end of consternation and controversy all over the United States. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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