When is it appropriate to use the word late to describe someone who has died? Late, in this sense, is short for lately deceased. There’s no hard and fast time frame, although it’s been suggested that anywhere from five to 30 years is about right...
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...
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...
Why do spelling bees use such strange words — often foreign words that almost nobody uses? Like cymotrichous, stromuhr, Laodicean, guerdon, serrefine, and Ursprache? We answered that question in last week’s episode — it’s what happens...
Hello! “A few pickles short of a jar,” “a few peas short of a casserole,” “two French fries short of a Happy Meal”—in this week’s archive episode, we talk about full-deckisms, those clever terms for someone...
Many of the world’s languages apparently derived from a prehistoric common ancestor known as Indo-European. But since no one ever wrote down a word of it, how do we know what it was like?