A caller from Tampa, Florida, talks about the eerie feeling she had when she heard an audio interview recorded with a speaker who at the time was unaware of his imminent death. She’d like a word to describe that feeling. Postalgia, maybe? This is...
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 Thanksgiving time...
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 couldn’t...
What’s the meaning of the word raunchy? A woman in Indianapolis, Indiana, thinks it means something bawdy or ribald, but to her husband’s family the word can mean “icky” or “unpleasant.” She learned this when one of them mentioned that her husband’s...
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 from...
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 the...