Did you know reading poetry improves your prose? That includes hip-hop lyrics, too. Also, how linguist can guess where you come from based on how you speak. What do you call someone who picks the chocolate out of the trail mix...
What do you call that children’s game where you hold hands and spin around until you’re too dizzy to stand? Sally Jarvis, who grew up in Eastern Arkansas, says she and her childhood playmates called it Going To Texas. This is part of a...
Do you store files on a flash drive, a thumb drive, a USB stick — or perhaps on a monkey? What do you call the little device that holds flash memory and goes into the USB drive of a computer? Some come in wild forms, like sushi or animals. This is...
Martha and Grant discuss why some puns work and others don’t. Martha recommends John Pollack’s observation in The Pun Also Rises describing how “for a split second, puns manage to hold open the elevator doors of language and...
Are we tested on what we’ve learned, or what we’ve learnt? Grant explains how efforts to replace the “t” verb ending with “ed” gradually took hold in the United States, but not in Britain. Affiliated nations, such...
In French, tenir la chandelle means “to act as a chaperone,” though literally it’s “to hold the candle.” Another expression that means “to chaperone” is the antiquated English phrase “to play...