The emotional appeal of handwriting and the emotional reveal of animal phrases. Should children be taught cursive writing in school, or is their time better spent studying other things? A handwritten note and a typed one may use the very same words...
Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap...
Ian in Clyde, North Carolina, is puzzled when a colleague uses the term blue million, meaning “a large amount.” Along with words like zillion and gazillion, this expression functions as an indefinite hyperbolic numeral. Sometimes the...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski pitches a puzzle about the names of minor-league baseball teams. For example, which team’s name might refer either to a type of weather phenomenon or a wooden roller coaster on the Coney Island boardwalk? This is part of...
Grant’s is a trivia-obsessed family. He and his wife participate in Learned League, an online trivia competition, and their son Guthrie now participates in Academic League, a high-school quiz league in San Diego, featuring questions from the...
What happens in a classroom of refugee and immigrant youngsters learning English? Their fresh approach to language can result in remarkable poetry — some of which is collected in the anthology England: Poems from a School. Also, new language among...