Ben calls from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to say that he and his wife, who is from Germany, were taking a leisurely stroll at Valley Forge. They ended up leaving one of the trails and taking a diagonal route across a field and agreed that in...
What happens when you de-pluralize a book title? As members of our Facebook group discovered, if you make the plurals in the name of a book singular, you can come up with some interesting plot lines. For example, John Steinbeck’s The...
Connie in Santee, California, is curious about a term she read in Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed history of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon). A shotgun house is a narrow house, the width...
A listener wants a scientific-sounding word for being attracted to shiny objects, the sort of trait people associate with crows, magpies, or pack rats. No exact term turns up, but neophilic, related to neophilia, means drawn to what’s new and is the...
electric scarecrow n.— «Residents in the area near the Country Ribbon plant complained to city hall about the loud sound system that the plant was using to keep crows and seagulls away from its caged chickens. The plant, in the...