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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
What is the letter H doing in the English word ghost? The answer has to do with 15th-century Flemish typesetters working for the English printer William Caxton. They often added an H after an initial hard G to reflect the spelling of cognates in...