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Are Adult Children Still “The Kids”?

Nancy in Aurora, Colorado, asks: Is there a better term for one’s adult offspring than childrenor kids. The list of expressions she’s pondered includes adult child, progeny, offspring, man-child, woman-child, descendant, successor...

Honeycomb - Make a Beeline (episode #1641) Episode 1641

Make a Beeline

If you make a beeline for something, you’re taking the shortest route possible. You’re also mimicking bee-havior! After a bee has visited enough flowers to gather nectar, she flies straight back to the hive. And: Even a word like...

Colossal Words

Colette Hiller’s Colossal Words for Kids: 75 Tremendous Words: Neatly Defined to Stick in the Mind (Bookshop|Amazon) uses clever rhymes to help children learn big, fun-to-say words like magnanimous, discombobulated, and acquiesce. This...

Episode 1502

Mimeographs and Dittos

How colors got their names, and a strange way to write. The terms blue and orange arrived in English via French, so why didn’t we also adapt the French for black and white? • Not every example of writing goes in one direction across the page...

Episode 1613

Blessing Box

Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...

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