Pam in Buford, South Carolina, grew up playing Duck Duck Goose, but her Minnesota-born husband knew this children’s game as Duck Duck Gray Duck. The game her husband played is described in an early edition of Education in the Kindergarten...
Advice about college essays from the winner of a top prize for children’s literature: Kelly Barnhill encourages teens to write about experiences that are uniquely their own, from a point of view that is theirs and no one else’s. Plus...
One of the words newly added to the 7th edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) is vaquita, the name of a small dolphin that lives in the Sea of Cortez. In Spanish, the name of this endangered animal means “little...
The brand-new, seventh edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon) is now out, and has been embiggened with 500 new words — including embiggen, pranayama, fauxhawk, and eggcorn. This is part of a complete episode.
Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (Bookshop|Amazon) takes its title from the temperature at which book pages burn. Some 200 copies of the first edition of the book were bound with an unusual material: asbestos. A few are still...
Why do we call a frankfurter a hot dog? It seems an unsettling 19th-century rumor is to blame. Also, if someone quits something abruptly, why do we say they quit cold turkey? This term’s roots may lie in the history of boxing. Plus, a...