A young caller from the Hudson Valley of New York wonders about his grandmother’s use of stemwinder to praise a speech she thought was excellent. In the early 1800s, people used pocket watches that had to be wound with a tiny key. Once someone figured out how to wind a watch with a little knob on a permanent stem instead, the new type of watch became extremely popular and people began applying the term stemwinder, not just to that model of watch, to other similarly impressive things. This is part of a complete episode.
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
If someone’s got melon, it means they’re smart. The expression most likely arose because of the resemblance between a melon and a human head. Several other foods are associated with having brains, including a cabbage, a gourd, and even a...
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