It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
Robert Greene’s pastoral romance Menaphon (Bookshop|Amazon), written in 1589, includes this memorable simile: “Thy breath is like the steeme of apple pies.” This is part of a complete episode.
Sue from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, wants help regarding a dispute with her husband about terms they use in a pickup sport like softball and you don’t have enough players to field a full-size team. If you get onto second base but then have to...
It may not be as rich a source of slang as baseball, but golf has contributed several terms to English, including stymie, “to get in the way of,” mulligan, a “do-over,” and par for the course, meaning “normal.”...
The game of baseball has alway inspired colorful commentary. Sometimes that means using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. The word stuff, for example, can refer to a pitcher’s repertoire, to the spin on a ball, or what happens to the ball...
In the early days of baseball, the term inside baseball referred to a particular style of play that emphasized sneaky strategies and clever teamwork as opposed to the power hitting that dominates today’s game. Later inside baseball came to...