Everybody in the pool! Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is inspired by the call-and-response game “Marco Polo.” The object is to guess the similarly assonant second names of fictitious explorers whose first name is also Marco. For example, which...
Nadine in San Antonio, Texas, disagrees with her boyfriend, who insists that the word surprise suggests something inherently good, so it’s impossible to call something a bad surprise. A quick look at data from the Brigham Young University corpora of...
A Carmel, Indiana, teacher is puzzled to hear younger colleagues pronounce the words kitten and mitten as KIH-un and MIH-un, with a noticeable break between the syllables. Linguist David Eddington of Brigham Young University reports that this...
What’s the difference between drunk and drunken? If you dig through the linguistic corpora (collections of carefully tagged texts used by linguists and lexicographers), you’ll find that we celebrate with drunken revelry and break into drunken...
The Google Books Corpus from Mark Davies at Brigham Young University tags words in Google Books with their parts of speech, so you can search how words really combine. For example, suitcase often follows battered, making battered suitcase a cliché...