Why is it that what you say to your family and what they hear are different? If you say “no,” your child hears “maybe,” and if you say “maybe,” she hears “ask again and again,” and “yes” is...
“You look like the wreck of the Hesperus!” It means you look “disheveled, ragged, dirty, hung over, or otherwise less than your best.” It may sound like an odd phrase, but it made perfect sense to generations of...
We recommend books that make great gifts for language lovers, talk about footwear called go-aheads, and look further into going commando. Also, was the 2008 election a historic event or an historic event?
Grant gives a brief review of the new third edition of Paul Dickson’s The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, all 974 pages and 4.5 pounds of it. This is part of a complete episode.
The second edition of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus is chock-full of synonyms, of course, but what makes it special are the essays and usage notes by authors such as Simon Winchester, David Lehman, Zadie Smith, and David Foster...
Welcome to another edition of the A Way with Words newsletter. This week we talked about "see a man about a horse," one of the most popular search terms that brings people to our web site. Who woulda thunk it? And, of course, we gave...