Quiz Guy John Chaneski is pondering the degrees offered by various colleges and universities — or at least, the degrees those institutions should offer, considering their names. For example, at what Ivy League school might you expect a course...
Miranda, a nurse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had a patient who described her hospital food as the pits, meaning it wasn’t good. The expressions the pits and in the pits arose out of 1950s college slang, and derive from the notion of smelly...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...
Matthew from Columbia, South Carolina, is curious about the word sirsee, a small gift or knickknack. Scattered through much of the American South, this colloquial term is sometimes spelled as surcy, or any of several other variations. The word may...
A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, woman serves on a committee that is choosing a new school. Some members propose calling their sports teams the Steel Knights. But is the term knight gender-neutral? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
“Helicopter parents” are so named because of their tendency to hover over their children’s lives. A Kentucky listener who made an initial college visit with her son reports two variations that she learned from staffers:...