Aspiring screenwriters take note: A surefire requisite for breaking into the business has, and will likely always be, a love of words—fat, buttery words, like ones the Marx Brothers writer Robert Pirosh wrote about in his 1934 letter to MGM. This is...
Remember the classic films Dogumentary and $3000? Those were their working titles, before they became Best In Show and Pretty Woman. We look at how movie titles evolve and change. Also, is Spanglish a real language? And balaclavas, teaching your...
What’s so special about the phrase Sit on a pan, Otis? It’s an example of a palindrome — a word or phrase that’s spelled the same backwards as it is forwards. This year’s contest known as the Oscars of the palindrome world inspires some clever, even...
A Hollywood entrance, in spelunker slang, is when a cave has a large, epic opening. Burkard Bilger’s epic article in The New Yorker on the world of squeeze freaks and other extreme cavers contains lots of great caving slang. This is part of a...
How did the word gay go from meaning lighthearted to homosexual? Also, why are elementary schools sometimes called grammar schools? Plus, imeldific, gone pecan, random Scrabble words, and the difference between borrow and lend. And the etiquette of...
Would some Hollywood classics still have been box-office hits if they’d stuck with their original names? Take Anhedonia, which later became Annie Hall. Or $3000, which became Pretty Woman. And can you guess the eventual title of the movie originally...
