When does a word’s past make it too sensitive to use in the present? In contra dancing, there’s a particular move that dancers traditionally call a gypsy. But there’s a growing recognition that many people find the term gypsy...
A simile is a rhetorical device that describes by comparing two different things or ideas using the word like or as. But what makes a good simile? The 1910 book Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, by Yale public-speaking instructor Grenville Kleiser...
Some similes from Grenville Kleiser’s 1910 phrasebook Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases still feel like tiny bits of poetry. Among the keepers: like footsteps upon wool for treading lightly, the sky was like a peach, and the wonderfully damp quaking...