In Japanese, the word san (さん) means “three” and kyuu (きゅう) means “nine.” Said together, the words sound like English “thank you,” so back in the 1990s, when pagers were all the rage among Japanese teens, typing 999 was a quick way to punningly...
We use the term Milky Way for that glowing arc across the sky. But how people picture it varies from culture to culture. In Sweden, that starry band goes by a name that means “Winter Street,” and in Hawaii, a term for the Milky Way translates as...
You know that Yogi Berra quote about how Nobody ever comes here; it’s too crowded? Actually, the first person to use this was actress Suzanne Ridgeway, who appeared in several movies with The Three Stooges. A new book shows that many well-known...
Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
So you think you can spell? Youngsters in modern spelling bees are expected to memorize a wide range of words, from chemical processes to names of rare animals. Also: In many languages, the word for “mother” begins with the letter M — but not in all...
In parts of Appalachia, the expression give someone down the road means “to reprimand” someone or “tell someone to get lost.” In Ireland, to give someone down the banks has a somewhat similar meaning, apparently referring to pushing that person into...