Daniel in Youngstown, Ohio, reports that his grandfather used an odd expression when the whole family left the house: We’re off like a herd of turtles — or a turd of hurtles! The first part of the expression is one of several similarly silly...
As we reported in our occasional e-newsletter, the recent discovery of dozens of previously unknown black holes has stargazers wondering: What’s the collective noun for a cluster of black holes? Our readers obliged with some clever...
When Audrey was growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the late 1990s, it seemed that everyone around her used the word jawn as an all-purpose substitute for other words, as in I took my jawn to the jawn and we had a bunch of jawns...
Mary Gordon in Austin, Texas, shares a delightful story about her elderly father and a handful of vegetables, which raises the question: what’s the plural of squash? Squashes? Or squash? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
On a boat in Alaska, a captain described a group of puffins as a circus of puffins. The birds do look comical, with their white faces, multicolored beaks, and frantically flapping wings when they take off from the water. The captain said she and...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is about common bonds among seemingly unrelated words. For example, name the one word that unites the following three items: report card, USDA inspected beef, incline. This is part of a complete episode...