A North Carolina listener is curious about his meemaw’s use of a term meaning “food” that he heard as either jasmine or jassum. A dialectal term with various spellings that include jassum, jasum, and jazm can mean “gravy,” “sauce,” or even “juice...
There was a time when William Shakespeare was just another little seven-year-old in school. Classes in his day were demanding — and all in Latin. A new book argues that this rigorous curriculum actually nurtured the creativity that later flourished...
If you’re ever near a sundial, step closer and look for a message. Many sundials bear haunting, poetic inscriptions about the brevity of life. Plus, language development in toddlers: why and how little ones pick up the exclamation Uh-oh! And a...
Michael in Aurora, Kentucky, wonders about the word peert, meaning “in good health” or “chipper,” as in Yesterday I felt kindly puny, but today I feel right peert. Heard primarily in the American South, peert, also spelled...
A Minnesota listener wonders about a phrase her father always used: the juice was worth the squeeze, meaning the result was worth the effort. It’s simply a reference to squeezing a piece of fruit for drinking. The musician Lizzo suggests a...
If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...