It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, advocated answering with Ahoy!, while Thomas Edison argued for Hello. As...
What do you say when you answer the telephone? On the NPR science blog, “Krulwich Wonders,” Robert Krulwich notes that hello did not become a standard greeting until the Edison Company recommended the word as a proper phone greeting...
chuck-and-duck n.— «The Edison Sault power plant is an imposing, quarter-mile-long, turn-of-the-last-century stone structure built along the river that features nearly 40 turbine outflow chutes where salmon congregate on their upstream...
boat n.— «Edison Senat learned how to speak English in five months. The 26-year-old Haiti native didn’t want to be tagged as “boat,” a derogatory term referring to immigrants. So he made it a point to speak it as often as he...
dipstick survey n.— «In a dipstick survey conducted by BT, English came out tops with 80 per cent non-English speakers listening to English and 20 per cent non-Hindi speakers listening to Hindi.» —“What’s our lingo?” by...