A North Carolina listener is fond of the German loanword Weltschmerz, literally “world pain,” a compound word made up of Welt, cognate with English world and Schmerz, cognate with smart as in That smarts! Coined by a 19th-century German author who...
Denise in Panama City, Florida, is trying to recall a word for the fear of not knowing what happens in the world after one dies. It’s a more elevated term than FOMO, the fear of missing out. A poetic alternative is gephyrophobia, a fear of...
A Fort Worth, Texas, woman remembers her grandfather used to say, “You live and learn, then you die and forget it all.” She wonders if he made it up. Turns out, the phrase goes back to the 1840s and may allude to the brevity of life or...
We all know the moon’s made of green cheese, but what’s the deal with the pie in the sky? The idiom pie in the sky, referring to something that’s pleasant to imagine but unattainable, comes from an early 20th century song called...
historical rhyme n.— «Take George Bush. By whom I mean George Bush (1796-1859), first cousin of the president’s great-great-great-grandfather. It would be hard to find a more unlikely forebear.…He published his first book...
