The term skycap for workers who help with luggage at an airport was coined by analogy with redcap, a term for porters on trains who wore red caps. Skycap was the winning entry in a contest. Another contest, held in 1923, gave us the word scofflaw, a...
Pulitzer-winning historian Barbara Tuchman has observed that her single most formative educational experience was exploring Harvard’s Widener Library. She captured the feelings of many library lovers when she added that her own daughter couldn’t...
“These days, a chicken leg is a rare dish” might sound like an odd thing to observe, but during World War II, it was among dozens of phonetically balanced sentences devised by researchers for testing cockpit transmissions and headphones in planes...
There’s a new kind of hamburger menu that involves pixels, not pickles. It’s that little stack of horizontal lines in the corner of a webpage that you click to see more options. You might use a hamburger menu while webrooming–that is, when you go...
Carriage, cart, wagon, buggy — how do you refer to that giant basket on wheels you push around the grocery store? As the Harvard Dialect Survey shows, the answer depends on what part of the United States you’re from. See the big Facebook discussion...
Every tub on its own bottom suggests that every person or entity in a group should be self-sufficient. This idiom, often abbreviated to ETOB, is common in academic speech to mean that each department or school should be responsible for raising its...
