John Chaneski’s latest puzzle is “The Yo-Yo Quiz,” and it’s not about famous cellists or first person pronouns in Spanish. The object is to guess the missing word that can be paired with either “up” or...
Slocum n.— «Sea gliders were conceived in the 1980s by Douglas Webb, a former researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Only in recent years, though, have they become fully operational and more capable. Some are called...
David in Port Washington, Wisconsin, wonders why English capitalizes the first-person singular pronoun I, but not me, we, or us. The usual explanation is practical rather than psychological: a lone lowercase i, especially before the dot became...
face taint n.— «Last night, Ryan said “face taint.” I searched the internet and it’s a fact, he is the first person to ever call the part between your top lip and nose the face taint. As much as I wanted to steal it, I have to give...
yowie n.— «Defence spokesman Major Klaus Boehme says the sniper’s outfit of hessian bags and appropriate camouflage paint evolved from a British idea of about 35 years ago. It had been developed in the mid-1970s when the Army started...
muda n.— «The Japanese word for waste is muda. In Japan, muda refers to any activity that is not value-adding. Taiichi Ohno, who introduced the just-in-time (JIT) production system at Toyota Motor Company, was the first person to...