A teacher of English as a second language asks our Facebook group to name some unusual words for ordinary things. The group’s suggestions include winklehawk, which means an L-shaped tear in cloth, and diastema, which means a gap between...
A woman whose first language is Persian wonders about the word enduring. Can she describe the work of being a parent as enduring? While the phrase is grammatically correct, the expression enduring parenting is not good idiomatic English. This is...
What’s the difference between drunk and drunken? If you dig through the linguistic corpora (collections of carefully tagged texts used by linguists and lexicographers), you’ll find that we celebrate with drunken revelry and break into drunken...
Sharpen those pencils! Martha and Grant are doing crossword puzzles on the air again, preparing for their appearance with NPR Puzzlemaster Will Shortz at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in New York City.
An ESL teacher puzzles over how to explain to his students the proper pronunciation of the word route. He asks whether the pronunciation “root” has been “routed” by “rowt.” This is part of a complete episode...
missional adj.— «Today’s missional Christians have expanded the mission of God to global warming, the environment, voting for the occasional democrat, serving the poor, building homes for Habitat for Humanity, giving away groceries to the...