Why do some Spanish speakers use adaptations of certain English terms when there’s already a perfectly good word for the same thing in Spanish? Sometimes the result is called “Spanglish.” For example, Spanish cuentas means “bills,”...
For a casual goodbye in English, we might say See you later, alligator or After while, crocodile. Many languages have similarly silly rhyming goodbyes. In Spanish, you can say Ciao, pescao! or “Bye, fish!” In Dutch, it’s Aju...
It’s the art of constructive feedback: If you’re a teacher with a mountain of papers to grade, you may find yourself puzzling over which kinds of notes in the margins work best. Martha and Grant discuss strategies for effective paper...
Julio from Frisco, Texas, asks about “do me a solid,” meaning “do me a favor,” after first hearing it in a context that made him wonder if it had something to do with bowel trouble. The phrase dates at least to the 1960s and appears to come from an...
When it’s raining and sunny at the same time, Almira from St. Paul, who grew up in Natal, Brazil, says she heard that it was a marriage between a fox and a nightingale. South Africans say it’s a monkey’s wedding. Those images are far happier than an...
A listener calls from in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to say that in her native Spanish, she can use several different words for love to denote a whole range of feelings, depending on how close she is to the other person. She’s frustrated that...