The new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Bookshop|Amazon) delightfully combines scientific writing with a literary sensibility and a gift for vivid similes. It’s by Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his...
For language lovers, it’s like New Year’s, Fourth of July, and the Super Bowl all rolled into one: The brand-new online edition of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Martha and Grant explain what all the fuss is about. Plus, the debate...
There are plenty of fish in the sea, but beware the catfish when trawling online. To catfish, from the 2010 documentary of the same name, has come to mean misrepresenting yourself online or instigating a hoax of a relationship. This is part of a...
Humorist Roy Blount Jr. sits down with Grant for a conversation about the controversy over writers’ rights, the Amazon Kindle 2, Roy’s recent book, Alphabet Juice, “sonicky” words, and noodling for catfish. He also clears up the mystery of whether...
river rash n.— «“It’s like I told the U.P.S. man the other day, it’s the challenge,” said Mr. Ramsey, who has a tattoo of a catfish on one shoulder and whose forearms are cross-hatched with battle scars, known in noodling circles as “river rash.”...