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Rosa recalls that when she was growing up in Karnes City, Texas, in the 1960s, she and other Mexican-American children were segregated into a separate classroom and forbidden to speak Spanish at school. Her teachers also replaced her first name...
Emily from Madison, Wisconsin, has three nieces and a nephew, and wonders if there’s a gender-neutral term for the group of them, in the same way cousins can designate one or two genders. German has the single word Geschwisterkind, meaning...
In deafening workplaces, like sawmills and factories, workers develop their own elaborate sign language to discuss everything from how their weekend went to when the boss is on his way. Plus, English speakers borrowed the words lieutenant and...
How do languages change and grow? Does every language acquire new words in the same way? Martha and Grant focus on how that process happens in English and Spanish. Plus, the stories behind the Spanish word gringo and the old instruction to...
When writing textbooks about slavery, which words best reflect its cold, hard reality? Some historians are dropping the word slave in favor of terms like enslaved person and captive, arguing that these terms are more accurate. And raising a...
How would you like to be welcomed to married life by friends and neighbors descending on your home for a noisy celebration, tearing off the labels of all your canned foods and scattering cornflakes in your bed? That tradition has almost died out...