The French have a musical term for paperclip. They call it le trombone. This is part of a complete episode.
We need a common word for “the parents of your son-in-law or daughter-in-law.” Although English has the word affines, it’s rarely used outside of such fields as anthropology or psychiatry. Other languages have more commonly used...
Male baristas aren’t called baristos for the same reason that male Sandinistas aren’t Sandinistos. There’s a certain class of nouns in both Italian and Spanish where the definite article changes to indicate gender, but the noun...
If you master a second language by the age of ten, native speakers won’t recognize that it’s not your first. Even so, things like idioms or prepositions can often trip up even the most skilled second-language speakers, if their second...
jiggy-vous n.— « “Jiggy-vous.” That pie slice of French-Canadian patois was a favorite saying of the teenage Gordon Lightfoot. It means “all right.” » —“If you could read his mind” by Steve...
angry-phone n.— «That rarest of breeds in the largely French-speaking province, Mr. Galganov is a bilingual Quebecker who rallies for the rights of English speakers (Anglophones) and against secession from Canada. That makes him an...