The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Bookshop|Amazon) had an earlier title: A Week with Willie the Worm. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s First Title” Here’s another book title that didn’t make it, A Week with...
If you speak a second or third language, you may remember the first time you dreamed in that new tongue. But does this milestone mean you’re actually fluent? And a couple’s dispute over the word regret: Say you wish you’d been able to meet Albert...
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s canine word quiz pads through English shaped by dogs, from internet doggo lingo to older surprises such as mutt. The mechanism is simple: each clue asks for a dog-related word, source, or coined blend. One clue starts with...
Martha shares a story about finding a monarch caterpillar and watching its metamorphosis in its gold-dotted chrysalis (from the Greek chrysos, “gold” as in the word chrysanthemum, meaning “golden flower”), to the butterfly’s eclosion, or “emergence”...
Some of the things kids say are so cute, it’s a crime to correct them. Over time, they’ll fix their pronunciations of callipitter (caterpillar), so enjoy those mistakes while they last. If you have a favorite little-kid mispronunciation, tell us...

