To give it the old college try means “to put forth one’s best effort.” The phrase stems from the early days of baseball, and arose from tension between the few professional college-educated players and those who’d picked up...
In the early days of baseball, the term inside baseball referred to a particular style of play that emphasized sneaky strategies and clever teamwork as opposed to the power hitting that dominates today’s game. Later inside baseball came to...
If you’re talking about the device used to control your computer’s cursor, is the plural computer mouse or computer mice? Either is correct, but the most common version is computer mice. In the early days of computers, engineers often...
Sarah from Moorhead, Minnesota, emailed a story from her early days of teaching in North Dakota. While reading the lunch menu to her students, she was flabbergasted to see that the day’s fare included something called slushburgers. She’d...
This week’s language headlines include the publication of new slang dictionary, and an entire book devoted to that tiny piece of punctuation, the period, and a tip-off about audio recordings of famous authors whose voices would otherwise be...