Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...
Whippoorwills, bob whites, and chickadees. How do we decide the names of birds and what to call their calls? Plus, the last syllables of Arkansas and Kansas are pronounced differently, but they come from the same etymological root. And: What’s the...
A North Carolina listener remembers that when she happened to predict things that later came true, her mother would say she had a goat’s mouth. Among other places, oi most of the islands in the Caribbean and also on the island of Mauritius, sayings...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add the definite...
Why is it harder to talk if we don’t move our hands? Even when we’re talking on the phone we feel the need to gesture to aid communication. A new book offers a look at the relatively new field of gesture studies. And: Ever wonder why we describe the...
Heidi from Reno, Nevada, shares a bar game in which players take turns trying to recite by memory the increasingly long concatenation of phrases one fat hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bear, four running hare, five fickle female, six simple...