Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle this week is inspired by social distancing. The first and last letters of each one-word answer are the same, but they’re separated by six letters. For example, what eight-letter word, beginning and ending...
Marge from Greenfield, Wisconsin, wonders why we refer to someone ostentatiously well-behaved as a goody-two-shoes. The 1765 book, The History of Little Goody Two Shoes tells the story of a poor young girl by the same name whose virtue is at long...
A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader is a lavishly illustrated anthology edited by Maria Popova of Brainpickings and Claudia Bedrick. It contains a particularly inspiring letter from writer Anne Lamott. This is part of a complete episode...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a classic deletion puzzle with a Greek twist. Each clue sentence hides a word that can lose the name of a Greek letter and become the answer suggested by the rest of the sentence. A sample clue is I piled my gear on the...
Our discussion about pangrams, those sentences that include every letter of the alphabet at least once, inspired a sharp listener to send us this one: How skillfully my acupuncturist jabs a needle into quivering flesh, exacting a zing! This is part...
James from Trabuco Canyon, California, learns that there’s a proper way to spell the letters of the alphabet. The letter J is spelled jay and H is spelled aitch. His own name would be spelled out as jay aye em ee ess. The letter Y is spelled...