Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock, for...
Following up on our discussion about the many meanings of the word regret, we share David Ray’s poem “Thanks, Robert Frost,” which addresses hope for the past as well as hope for the future. This poem was read with permission of the author. This is...
As a noun, respair means “the return of hope after a period of despair.” As a verb, respair means “to have hope again.” Although both forms are rare and obsolete, they seem ripe for reviving. Respair is among dozens of uplifting terms collected in...
A listener in Hope, North Wales, points out that there’s punny way to spell a hungry horse in four letters. (Hint: one particularly British synonym for horse is gee-gee.) This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Hungry Horse Pun” I’ve been...
Busman’s holiday is time off spent doing something closely related to one’s work, not necessarily clocking in on a day off. Tracy in Pleasanton, California, remembers using it to describe her father, who worked for TWA at San Francisco airport and...
Did you ever use a tilly ticket in the bathroom?