John in Cincinnati, Ohio, says that if something seems unsurprising to him, he’ll say sarcastically Color me surprised. John is sincerely surprised to learn that the color me X construction, where X is any adjective, goes back to a 1962 bestseller...
Ever wonder what medieval England looked and sounded like? In Old English, the word hord meant “treasure” and your wordhord was the treasure of words locked up inside you. A delightful new book uses the language of that period to create...
League of the Lexicon is a wide-ranging trivia game for language lovers with thousands of questions on all matters linguistic. Creator Joshua Blackburn has also compiled a treasure trove of linguistic delights in a companion volume called The...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...
Hannah from Menominee, Michigan, grew up hearing her father invite people out for a drive with, Let’s go for a scud. He traces it to an inside joke about his 1976 Mercury Montego MX and the names of MX and Scud missiles, but scud is also an old verb...
