Shuba in Sammamish, Washington, grew up in India, where she heard speakers of Indian English refer to an eggplant as a brinjal. She assumed that this was a British English term, but later realized that in Britain, this vegetable is called an...
The Range Rover Velar has nothing to do with the linguistic term velar, which is pronounced VEE-lurr, and describes a consonant produced by the back of the tongue against the soft palate, such as K or G. The automotive Velar is pronounced vuh-LARR...
Silas, a 10th-grader in Madison, Wisconsin, is working on his own conlang, or constructed language. He wonders how and why the French uvular R sound, as in the French word rouge, came about, as opposed to the rolled Spanish R in carro. As...
Funny cat videos and cute online photos inspire equally adorable slang terms we use to talk about them. • Also, when a salamander is not a salamander, the story of an Italian term for a dish towel used halfway across the world, Bozo buttons...
The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language (Bookshop|Amazon) reflects 450 years of English as it has been spoken and written in what is now the United States. Edited by Ilan Stavans, this anthology of original texts—essays...
The Italian idiom far venire il latte alle ginocchia literally means “to make milk come to the knees.” Figuratively, it means “to be really boring.” It’s been suggested that the phrase refers to the tedious process of...