It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Welcome to another A Way with Words newsletter! With any luck, our A Way with Words email messages don’t end up in your spam folder. But did you ever wonder why junk mail is called spam in the first place? There’s a funny story behind this term, and...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...
There are lots of creative names for the @, also known in English as the at-sign. In Denmark and Sweden, it’s sometimes called the snabel-a, or “elephant trunk.” In Italian, it’s a chiocciola, or “snail. In Greek...
Those annoying add-on fees that come at the end of an online transaction are part of a lucrative practice known as drip pricing. The word drip has become a descriptor for anything that slowly increases revenue. For example, drip marketing involves...
Ribbon fall. Gallery forest. You won’t find terms like these in most dictionaries, but they and hundreds like them are discussed by famous writers in the book Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. The book is an intriguing collection...