According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
A Kentucky listener says her father often prefaced statements with the phrase I tell you what’s the truth. This regionalism appears in the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Bookshop|Amazon). A shorter version is I’ll tell you...
Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s short story “Madame Cassandra” from her book Saints and Sinners (Bookshop|Amazon) opens with a character observing, “I always love the way bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the...
Colette Hiller’s Colossal Words for Kids: 75 Tremendous Words: Neatly Defined to Stick in the Mind (Bookshop|Amazon) uses clever rhymes to help children learn big, fun-to-say words like magnanimous, discombobulated, and acquiesce. This...
If you reeeeeeeeeally want to emphasize something in writing, you can engage in what linguists call expressive lengthening, or making a word longer by repeating letters. It’s an example of paralinguistic restitution — rendering in text...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been thumbing through The Devil’s Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon), the satirical work by Ambrose Bierce that provides cheeky definitions for familiar words. For example, Bierce defines the word positive as...