When is it appropriate to use the word late to describe someone who has died? Late, in this sense, is short for lately deceased. There’s no hard and fast time frame, although it’s been suggested that anywhere from five to 30 years is about right...
Looking for a word that denotes being really excited for someone, but also a little sad? One option is bittersweet, but if you’d like a term that’s not quite so overused, yayboo is taking hold online. The Modern Greek word charmolype...
We heard from a woman who told her boyfriend about her plan to get her hair cut. He responded that he thought that particular style would make her hair “worse.” Does the word worse in this case imply that her hair was bad to begin with...
With the idiom “it’s all downhill from here,” the meaning depends on the context. With an optimistic tone, it means that something’s heading toward an inevitably good ending, but there are times in business uses where it...
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, in a Supreme Court opinion no less, that “a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time...
A couple is not necessarily the same as a pair; it can certainly mean more than two, and it’s always dependent on context. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Couple vs. Pair” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Yes...