Quiz Guy John Chaneski maintains that lots of nation’s names are hiding in plain sight during our everyday conversations, and he has a puzzle to prove it. For example, if he says, “Here on the farm, we don’t drink coffee. We just take the dry...
Pax! is what Matthew in Dallas, Texas, remembers shouting as a boy in Nairobi when a game of tag needed to pause for a loose shoelace or a fall, often with crossed fingers to make the truce visible. The word is Latin for peace, and in playground use...
Auntie and uncle are often used beyond the family tree as respectful terms for older adults who are close to the family but not blood relatives. Listeners reported this pattern in Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, South Africa, India, the Philippines...
dose n.— «Then on Tuesday, at one of the many literary events I attend, I saw Eva, a lass we had a short ‘dose’ as they call them—as if women are innocuous inoculations—when I was 25 years old, fresh from college, and she was a stroke of...
gun time n.— «A similar issue arose at the Chicago Marathon two weeks ago, when Wesley Korir of Kenya finished fourth, despite starting five minutes after the elite runners. Like O’Connell, his time was clear because of the electronic...
third culture kid n.— «Sonia wants to return to Kenya sometime—”I mean, it’s my home”—but doesn’t know when. As a Kenyan-Indian who moved to Singapore when she was six and lived there for 14 years before attending college in...