Postalgia is a possible new coinage for the sorrowful, time-shifted awareness Alice in Tampa describes when she hears an old podcast interview with someone who has since died, while knowing the speaker had no idea what was coming. Words like...
An Indianapolis, Indiana, listener says that his mother-in-law was asked by a child where she was going, would jokingly sing that she was “going to the Turkey trot trot trot, across the lot, lot, lot, feeling fine, fine, fine until...
Pulitzer-winning historian Barbara Tuchman has observed that her single most formative educational experience was exploring Harvard’s Widener Library. She captured the feelings of many library lovers when she added that her own daughter...
Bridget in Indianapolis, Indiana, knows raunchy as something bawdy or ribald, but her husband’s family uses it to mean “icky,” “unpleasant,” or “under the weather.” She first noticed the difference when his very polite Southern grandmother said his...
The books we love as children may influence our careers more than we realize. As a child, Martha was fascinated with stories of cracking codes, and Grant loved books with glossaries–not that far from the kind of work they do today. A caller...
The Stendhal syndrome is a term used to describe feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of a work of art. The name comes from the French writer Stendhal, who wrote about the dizzying sensation of seeing the art in Florence. It’s somewhat similar to...