A member of our Facebook group reports that her mother used to deride a privileged and expensively dressed woman with the phrase, Oh, she thinks she’s so katish! Used since the 1890s in the North Central part of the United States, katish or...
A snout-fair is a “good-looking person,” a throttlebottom is an “inept public official,” and ejectamenta is “material spewed from a volcano.” Each month, members of a Facebook group for calligraphy enthusiasts...
What’s a word for the act of being so focused on documenting an important event, such as a wedding or an eclipse, that your effort to capture it distracts from experiencing the event itself? The A Way with Words Facebook group has some...
According to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, it’s important to master the basics of writing, but there comes a time when you have to strike out on your own and teach yourself. Also: Spanish idioms involving food, a conversation about the...
Members of our Facebook group are inventing funny names for Greek gods by mispronouncing familiar words with the accent on the wrong syllable, such as Episodes /eh-PIH-suh-deez/, god of continuing stories, and Lemonades /leh-moe-NAH-deez/, god of...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle features intentional misunderstandings of the names of familiar movies and TV shows. For example, if John refers to a creepy Netflix show set in the 1980s called More Unusual Objects, what’s the program he...