Michelle calls from Peoria, Illinois, about a slang term that she and her friend Liz often heard when they were students at Bradley University in the mid-1990s. In those days before modern social media, to squid or to engage in squidding referred to...
As we reported in our occasional e-newsletter, the recent discovery of dozens of previously unknown black holes has stargazers wondering: What’s the collective noun for a cluster of black holes? Our readers obliged with some clever...
The Internet Archive offers a wealth of digital books and other publications for free checkout, including the 1948 collection of jokes, riddles, and playground sayings called A Rocket in My Pocket: The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans. This is...
Decisions by dictionary editors, wacky wordplay, and Walt Whitman’s soaring verse. How do lexicographers decide which historical figures deserve a mention or perhaps even an illustration in the dictionary? The answer changes with the times. •...
A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. The Twitter feed @PangramTweets uses a bot to scour the internet for pangrammatic tweets, providing a weirdly wonderful window on what people write. This is part of a...
When you pick up a book of poems, how many do you read in one sitting? Some people devour several in a row, while others savor them much more slowly. Plus, it’s a problem faced by politicians and public speakers: When you have to stand in...
