Why don’t we refer to prunes as dried plums? Prune and plum come from the same distant etymological roots and traveled into English via French and German respectively. The French still use prune for “plum.” Other foods that undergo...
Trevor in Austin, Texas, notes that when his young son was talking about drawing a cat, but erasing part of it, the boy used the term deleting rather than erasing. Should he correct his son, or is this a natural evolution of language in the digital...
The giant statues of Easter Island are called moai. They’re the subject of a Nova/National Geographic special about who those statues might have been moved into place. The technique that islanders used to move them may have involved tugging at ropes...
Questions from young listeners and conversations about everything from shifting slang to a bizarre cooking technique. Kids ask about how to talk about finding information on the internet, how tartar sauce got its name, and if the expression high and...
Emily in San Diego wonders whether the brand name Segway is nudging people toward spelling segue as segway. The older word’s spelling looks un-English because it came through Italian seguire, meaning “to follow,” with relatives in Latin and in non...
Sophia, a 13-year-old from Naperville, Illinois, says she, her sister, and friends use search it up to mean look it up online, despite her mother’s objection that it should be look it up or just search it. The phrasing is real and especially common...