How do you pronounce the word mobile, as in the toy that hangs above a baby’s crib? In the United States, that kind of mobile is pronounced MOH-beel, but in the United Kingdom, it’s MOH-byle. In the early 1930s, the American sculptor Alexander...
How did the term Bohemian come to be associated with literary and artistic nonconformists who live outside mainstream society? In the early 19th century, the French term La bohème was applied to the Romani people, also known as the Roma, a...
It’s hard to remember how to spell the names of some cities. Tallahassee, Florida, for example. Then there are towns with very few letters to remember. Y, a tiny town in northern France, has only two main streets, which come together to form the...
Alligator arms is a joking way to describe a tightwad whose arms suddenly seem too short to reach the restaurant check or a wallet. Bob from Minnesota uses it alongside a little menagerie of similar images: in Argentina, a miserly person may be said...
Carolyn in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has been teaching her grandchildren some conventional French gestures to tease their grandfather. She’s using the book Beaux Gestes: A Guide to French Body Talk (Bookshop|Amazon) by renowned French scholar Laurence...
In Argentina, you might describe a stingy person as someone who has un cocodrilo en el bolsillo or “a crocodile in the pocket.” In France, such a person is said to have oursins, or “sea urchins” in that pocket. In various other languages, miserly...