Quiz Guy John Chaneski maintains that lots of nation’s names are hiding in plain sight during our everyday conversations, and he has a puzzle to prove it. For example, if he says, “Here on the farm, we don’t drink coffee. We just take the dry grass...
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 a vivid look...
Connie in Santee, California, is curious about a term she read in Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed history of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon). A shotgun house is a narrow house, the width of one...
Patience, Hope, and Charity are pretty ambitious things to name your children. But what about Hate-evil, Be-courteous, or Search-the-scriptures? Or Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith? Puritan parents sometimes gave their kids so as to encourage those...
boat n.— «Edison Senat learned how to speak English in five months. The 26-year-old Haiti native didn’t want to be tagged as “boat,” a derogatory term referring to immigrants. So he made it a point to speak it as often as he could until he became...
Haitian happiness
n.— «Haitian Hapiness—(verb) Abnormally frequent and abnormally fluid evacuation of the bowels.» —“Haitian Hapiness Defined and Explained” Livesay Haiti WebLog (La Digue, Haiti) May 12, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
