When a teenager went a week without talking as part of a school project, he noticed a surprising side effect: Instead of rehearsing a response to what other people were saying to him, he was focused on listening — and feeling smarter as a result...
Gossip goes by many names: the poop, the scoop, the lowdown, the dope, the scuttlebutt, the 411, the grapes, the gore, and hot tea. Plus, John Donne’s love poems are among the greatest in the English language, even as they’re famously...
We dish about the many terms for “gossip,” including hot tea, scuttlebutt, the scoop, the 411, the lowdown, the dirt, the scoop, hot goss, the poop, the dope, the T. In prison slang, grapes means “gossip,” and particularly...
Ever wonder what medieval England looked and sounded like? In Old English, the word hord meant “treasure” and your wordhord was the treasure of words locked up inside you. A delightful new book uses the language of that period to create...
Novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince were very different types of artists, but they also had a lot in common. A new book chronicling their extraordinary careers becomes a larger meditation on perfectionism and creativity itself. Plus...
You know how when two people accidentally say the same thing simultaneously, they then race to yell Jinx!? There may be hundreds of versions of this game. Anne and her young daughter Amina in Jacksonville, Florida, say versions they’ve heard...