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...
How do actors bring Shakespeare’s lines to life so that modern audiences immediately understand the text? One way is to emphasize the names of people and places at certain points. That technique is called billboarding. And: Anyone for an...
Engineer and language enthusiast Anu Garg runs a popular website, Wordsmith.org, which includes the A.Word.A.Day email, along with an anagram server, and other offerings for fellow word lovers. To celebrate the site’s 25th anniversary, Garg...
A college student in Bowling Green, Kentucky, wonders about the origin of the word emoji. Although you might guess that the name for these little pictures inserted into text messages contains the English word emotion, that’s just a coincidence...