Jennifer from San Diego giggles whenever she hears per se. She first noticed it when a character in a South Park episode used the phrase constantly. Some people informally spell it per say, but the Latin se means itself. So per se means “in itself”...
Our Quiz Master John Chaneski has some answers to classic songs in this week’s puzzle about song titles in question form. For example, the answer “Because they’re too dumb to stay out of it” answers the musical question from...
Lester in Dallas wonders why colleagues spell holistic as wholistic when they mean looking at a project as a whole. The standard spelling is holistic; the wholistic variant reflects folk etymology, a reshaping based on the tempting but misleading...
Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a quiz called Take-Offs. For each clue, remove the first letter of a word to get the second (or third) word in the puzzle. For example, in the first chapter of Moby Dick, Ishmael had to screw up his courage and join...
Greg Pliska’s game Double Definition uses a cryptic-crossword trick: each clue gives two meanings that point to the same word, with no separate wordplay half. A clue such as trim a tree splits neatly in two, and crazy flying mammals works the same...
James, an art-supplies dealer in Dallas, shares street-art vocabulary from graffiti culture. A writer is someone who does graffiti, and bombing usually refers to doing illegal graffiti rather than a legal mural, with a finished piece sometimes...
