New research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that people who speak more than one languagetend to be less superstitious if they’re reading or thinking in a different language. This is part of a complete episode...
A teacher in Dallas, Texas, is trying to learn Spanish in order to chat casually with some of his students. He’s having some success with the smartphone app DuoLingo. But an app won’t necessarily give him the slang vocabulary he needs. A good way to...
What’s in YOUR spice rack? Say you’re cooking up a pot of chili, and you need to add more of that warm, earthy, powdered spice. Do you reach for a bottle of KOO-min? KYOO-min? Or are you going to add KUMM-in? The pronunciation given in dictionaries...
Open your kitchen cupboard or a cookbook, and chances are you’ll come across a lot of spices and peppers with recognizable names that you still can’t pronounce properly, like turmeric, cayenne, and habanero. We often give foreign-sounding...
It used to be that you called any mixed-breed dog a mutt. But at today’s dog parks, you’re just as likely to run into schnugs, bassadors, and dalmadoodles. Also, if someone has a suntan, you might say he’s brown as a berry. But then, when’s the last...
My postillion has been struck by lightning is one of many lines found in foreign language phrase books that have no real purpose. Mark Twain complained about the same thing in his essay, “The Awful German Language.” This is part of a complete...
