We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing...
If you catch your blue jeans on a nail, you may find yourself with a winklehawk. This term, adapted into English from Dutch, means “an L-shaped tear in a piece of fabric.” And: What’s your relationship with the books on your...
A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems...
Vince from Brooklyn, New York, remembers growing up there and using the expression cut a chogi! to mean “beat it!” or “get away from here!” He’d assumed it was simply Brooklynese until years later in Alabama, when he...
The French expression peigner la girafe means to do a useless, tedious, or annoying job, but literally translates as “to comb the giraffe.” That’s one of the many gems in Mark Abley’s new book Watch Your Tongue: What Our...
In English, fairy tales often begin with the phrase “once upon a time.” In contrast, Korean folktales often begin with “In the old days, when tigers used to smoke,” or similar phrases, such as “In the old, old days when...