On a busy day in the emergency room, Alisa of Dallas, Texas, told an efficient colleague that she was really humming, meaning it as a compliment. Her colleague took offense, maintaining that humming meant “smelly.” Since the 18th century, English speakers in the UK have used humming to mean “stinking,” probably a reference to the busy, buggy nature of a manure or compost heap. This is part of a complete episode.
It’s hard to remember how to spell the names of some cities. Tallahassee, Florida, for example. Then there are towns with very few letters to remember. Y, a tiny town in northern France, has only two main streets, which come together to form...
Shipping characters in fiction in ways the original author didn’t intend — picturing them in new non-canon relationships — goes back at least as far as so-called slash fiction or slashfic, a type of fan fiction involving same-sex romantic or...
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