If your last name is Cook or Smith, your ancestors probably worked in those professions. But what if your last name is Pope? Or Abbott? And if you have enough food for Coxeyβs army, you have more than enough to go around. The phrase refers to...
In English, you might describe something easy to do as a cinch or a piece of cake. Several other languages employ tasty metaphors to convey a similar idea. In Brazilian Portuguese, you something easy can be described with an idiom that translates as...
Depending on its mood, a turkeyβs skin can shift from red to blue to white, due to changes in the blood vessels between bundles of collagen. That phenomenon is reflected in the Japanese term for βturkey,β shichimencho (δΈι’ι³₯), which translates as...
The art of the invitation can be tricky. An inviterβs idea of invitation may be taken by an invitee as merely mentioning an event while theyβre nearby. One such a misunderstanding went on for months! Plus, George Saunders, winner of the Booker...
While vacationing on Costa Ricaβs Caribbean coast, a listener encountered an Australian who used the term skylarking to mean βhorsing around.β The verb to skylark goes back hundreds of years and once referred to racing through the rigging of a...
A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. Itβs called The Peopleβs Tongue, and itβs a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems, lyrics, and much...