Right off the bat, it’s easy to think of several everyday expressions that derive from America’s pastime–including “right off the bat.” The Dickson Baseball Dictionary catalogues not only those contributions but also...
To boot has nothing to do with footwear or an extra kick. Darla in Memphis, Tennessee, asks about the phrase. It goes back to Old English bot, meaning advantage, remedy, or a good thing, and is linguistically related to better and best. Today it...
Sure, it’s scary to send your writing to a literary agent. But pity the poor agent who must wade through hundreds of terrible query letters a week! One of them shares excerpts from those hilariously bad query letters on a blog called SlushPile...
If you’re sending out party invitations, what’s a sure-fire way to get hold of everyone? Email? Snailmail? Facebook? Texting? Twitter? Or a plain old-fashioned phone call? Different folks have different communication preferences, and...
A bunch of English words actually take from the names of old places: peach comes from Persia, bungalow refers to a house “of the Bengal type,” and laconic refers to the region of Sparta famous as a place where people valued speech that...
Have a question about objective pronouns? Whom ya gonna call? Wait–is that right? Or would it be “who ya gonna call”? “Whom” may be technically correct, but insisting on it can get you called an elitist. It’s...