Alan from Omaha, Nebraska, finds himself turning nouns into verbs, telling his daughter he’s glad she’s old enough to start to human and using jenga as a verb to refer to arranging items carefully, after the game Jenga, which involves removing...
The expression to wing it, meaning to perform by improvising or with little preparation, comes from the world of 19th-century theater, where it denoted the work of understudies who stepped onstage and received prompting from the wings of the stage...
Shelby calls from Rockville, Indiana, to ask about the origin of the phrase keep your powder dry. Many people surmise it derives from words uttered by Oliver Cromwell, but there’s no recorded evidence of this. The phrase first pops up in the early...
You can spitball ideas all you want, but spiffball is not a real variation of the term. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Spitball vs. Spiffball” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, Martha. This is Isaac from Portland, Oregon. How...
Grant offers of a list of children’s books he’s been enjoying with his six-year-old son: Yotsuba&!, the energetic, curious Manga character; Pippi Longstocking; Calvin and Hobbes; the mad scientist Franny K. Stein; and the venerable Encyclopedia...