It’s the business of business jargon. Say you’re in line at the drugstore. Does it bother you if the cashier says, “Next guest”? In department stores and coffeeshops, does the term “guest” suggest real...
Creative communication in a noisy world! Writing a clever 140-character tweet isn’t easy. But you know what’s even more impressive? Working all 26 letters of the alphabet into just one sentence! The term for that type of sentence is...
The disgruntled consumer who tweeted “My ‘prize’ in my Cracker Jack box…whoever does quality control needs to get fired” accidentally did something miraculous. This message includes all 26 letters of the alphabet...
There’s a reason why we have both capital and lowercase letters. As the alphabet went from the Phoenicians to the Greeks to the Romans, letters took on new sounds, and the need to write quickly brought about the introduction of lowercase...
If you’re into the manners and customs of correspondence, don’t forget that a boy under the age of about 12 is referred to as a Master, and a man over the age of 18 is a Mister. It goes back to the time of guild workers. This is part of...
John Chaneski’s Word Olympics quiz is a pantheon of wordplay events, with medals optional and pedantry encouraged. Clues range from two-letter Scrabble-legal surprise sounds to the name for grotesque stone figures that don’t channel rainwater, plus...