It’s hard to remember how to spell the names of some cities. Tallahassee, Florida, for example. Then there are towns with very few letters to remember. Y, a tiny town in northern France, has only two main streets, which come together to form the...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is all about substituting the letter B for a certain letter that falls between the letters O and Q. For example, if you’re substituting the letter B for that particular letter, what would you call the skill that some...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has devised another take-off puzzle, meaning that taking off the first letter of a word results in a second word. This time, the initial letter is the letter O. For example, if someone has unlatched the gate to the pigsty...
In a sweaty letter to a friend while vacationing on the island of Elba, poet Dylan Thomas wrote colorfully and expressively about a terrible heat wave, complaining that, among other things, “My brains are hanging out like a dog’s tongue.” This is...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle was inspired by the Greek letter chi. All of the answers contain the letters C-H-I. For example, if you see a man standing idly by while his wife struggles with grocery bags, you might surmise that something’s dead...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...