Among the proverbs in Leo Rosten’s Treasury of Jewish Quotations (Amazon): If you drop gold and books, pick up the books first, then the gold. This is part of a complete episode.
The lingo of metal detectorists is full of colorful terms: A coinball is a clot of earth with a coin in it, a nighthawk is someone who detects without a permit under cover of darkness, a gold dance is a gleeful jig upon discovering precious metal...
You may have heard the advice that to build your vocabulary you should read, read, and then read some more – and make sure to include a wide variety of publications. But what if you just don’t have that kind of time? Martha and Grant...
John Webster’s 1623 tragedy The Duchess of Malfi includes the memorable line: “Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near have neither heat nor light.” Much later, Stephen Crane expressed a similar idea in...
Did you know reading poetry improves your prose? That includes hip-hop lyrics, too. Also, how linguist can guess where you come from based on how you speak. What do you call someone who picks the chocolate out of the trail mix...
The Library of Congress is archiving the entire content of Twitter. Grant explains why that’s a gold mine for language researchers like David Bamman at Tufts University. You can see some of the results Bamman’s compiled at Lexicalist.com...