Working for a furniture maker in New England, Steven and his co-workers used the word Dutchman to denote a high-quality patch to disguise an imperfection in the wood. In an article in the Journal of American Speech, historian Archie Green notes that...
The new play English by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi powerfully evokes the challenges and rewards and changes involved in struggling to gain fluency in another language. Reviewing the play in the The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz...
A Delaware listener recounts a funny story about visiting a friend in Maryland who asked him to retten up the house while she went to the store. He had no idea what she meant, so he just lounged around while she was gone — only to find out later...
Squire in Murray, Kentucky, wonders about the expression hot as flugens, meaning “really hot.” The term flugens serves as an emphasizer or making money like flugens or ran like flugens or even cold as blue flugens. In the 1830s, many newspapers in...
A woman who immigrated from the Philippines to the United States wonders: If you’re studying a second language and start dreaming in it, does that mean you’ve reached the point of fluency? English has adopted several words from her native language...
The vast majority of young students at Oxford Spires Academy in England are refugees and economic migrants. According to teacher Kate Clanchy, this mixture of cultures and languages creates something magical, including some remarkable poetry in...
