Funny cat videos and cute online photos inspire equally adorable slang terms we use to talk about them. • Also, when a salamander is not a salamander, the story of an Italian term for a dish towel used halfway across the world, Bozo buttons...
It’s cats and dogs, and a few other critters, too. Animals prowl around inside several English words, including sleuth, which was originally sleuth-hound, a synonym for bloodhound. Plus, the language we use with our pets and the ways they...
Will Shortz, crossword editor of the New York Times and puzzlemaster on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday,” shares a quiz about a whole menagerie of animals with names that are portmanteaus. For example, if you could cross a chipmunk and a monkey, you...
We’ve talked before about how names of our pets often evolve over time. Cartoonist Scott Metzger captured this idea in a drawing of a Nickname Support Group for dogs and cats. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A Flurry of Furry...
Jonathan Saha is an associate professor of history at Durham University in England. His latest book is Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Bookshop|Amazon), which chronicles how the lives of animals were irrevocably changed by...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is about animal anatomy, specifically nouns and adjectives formed by combining the name of an animal with another word. For example, what zoologically-related noun is associated with the idea of “a high, close-fitting...