It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when people disagreed over the best word to use when answering the phone. Alexander Graham Bell suggested answering with ahoy! but Thomas Edison was partial to hello! A fascinating new book about...
Need a way to select someone from a group to be a recipient of something? Horsengoggle it! Kids have been horsengoggling for a long time, and sometimes children start out this counting game in German, with Einz, Zwei, Drei, Horsengoggle! No one...
It may not be as rich a source of slang as baseball, but golf has contributed several terms to English, including stymie, “to get in the way of,” mulligan, a “do-over,” and par for the course, meaning “normal.”...
Silence comes in many forms. Writer Paul Goodman says there is, for example, the noisy silence of “resentment and self-recrimination,” and the helpful, participatory silence of actively listening to someone speak. • The strange story...
Sometimes it’s a challenge to give a book a chance: How many pages should you read before deciding it’s not worth your time? There’s a new formula to help with that decision — and it’s all based on your age. • Have you ever...
Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield set in today’s Appalachia. Martha shares memories of a long-ago visit to Kingsolver’s family farm in Virginia, where they...