Would you rather live in a world with no adjectives … or no verbs — and why? Also, who in the world is that director Alan Smithee [SMITH-ee] who made decades’ of crummy films? Turns out that if a movie director has his work wrested away...
A recent call from a video editor looking for a fancy word to refer to extracting video from a computer drew a huge response from listeners trying to help. The suggestions they offered include cull, evict, expunge, expede, disassemble, de-vid, and...
Some people proudly embrace the label cancer survivor, while others feel that’s not quite the right word. Is there a better term for someone who’s battled cancer? Writers and listeners share the best sentence they’ve read all day...
If an older man and woman spend lots of time together, going to family gatherings and the like, but they’re NOT dating, what do you call their relationship? Best friends? Dear friends? Or . . . something else? And a marathon runner who’s...
Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn has been mulling how to classify the term BBQ, since the “Q” reflects sound, not an initial. It’s a type of abbreviation called clipping. BBQ goes back to restaurant signs and menus from...
Try to explain something while only using the thousand most common words in English. It’s harder than you might think. This comic from xkcd points out the difficulty in describing a space ship called the Up Goer Five, and an Up-Goer Five Text...