How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...
Novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince were very different types of artists, but they also had a lot in common. A new book chronicling their extraordinary careers becomes a larger meditation on perfectionism and creativity itself. Plus...
Katie in the Northwoods of Wisconsin knows jonard as the shame that follows having brought trouble on yourself, not merely an embarrassing accident. It’s connected with Jonah and joner, dialect words for a jinx, a pest, or someone who brings bad...
After our conversation about jinx and the verbal games that ensue when two people accidentally say the same word at the same time, a Kansas listener shared this ditty she heard as a youngster: Jinx! Buy me a coke / Inky pinky stinky winky / Flush it...
You know how when two people accidentally say the same thing simultaneously, they then race to yell Jinx!? There may be hundreds of versions of this game. Anne and her young daughter Amina in Jacksonville, Florida, say versions they’ve heard include...
When they happen to say the same word at the very same time, many children play a version of the jinx game that ends with the declaration, “You owe me a Coke!” Martha shares an old version from the Ozarks that ends with a different line: “What goes...