Tagletter

Take off a Jot or Iota Quiz

​​Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is a take-off — literally. The challenge is to take off the letter I or J from the beginning of one word, leaving another word entirely. For example, find the two words clued by this sentence: My factory makes...

Nickname Stories

Following our earlier conversation about nicknames, listeners are still responding with stories about their own nicknames. Two of those show how nicknames sometimes arise from a single incident, then stick around for years. In one story, a girl...

Words that Looks Like What They Refer to

Dan from Elmira, New York, wonders if there’s such a thing as “structural” onomatopoeia, where the visual appearance or architecture of a written word suggests the meaning of the word. For example, he says, the word level is a...

A Capital Mistake

Jonah, a music teacher, in Baltimore, Maryland, shares a funny story about a student who misunderstood his question about the capital of his home state. That left Jonah wondering about the difference between the words capital and capitol. The former...

Replace with P Word Game

Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle requires replacing an initial consonant with the letter P. For example, John says he plans to open what his mother used to call a beauty parlor in his home, but his will have a romantic twist. His establishment...