Aaron in Los Angeles, California, notes while using public transit in Britain he and other passengers were instructed to alight from the front, meaning “exit the car from the front.” Alight comes from an Old English word alihtan, literally, to...
A Vermont listener named Amy is looking for a word to denote a particular kind of light. She has an eye condition that makes her photophobic, which means that ordinary light makes her physically uncomfortable. She wants a word that describes that...
How do we agree on how to name shades and tints of colors? A famous study in the 1960s, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Bookshop|Amazon by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that if a language had only two color terms, they were...
The Spanish expression dar a luz literally means to give to the light, and it’s the usual way to say to give birth. A woman in labor may be described as alumbrando, from the same luminous family of words, with the image of a baby moving from...
A girl in Omaha, Nebraska, has a dispute with her father about the meaning of the words opaque and translucent. Opaque describes something that blocks light completely. Something translucent lets some light pass through. This is part of a complete...
Among ultralight backpackers, a gram weenie is someone who weighs gear with almost comic precision, trying to trim every possible gram from a pack. The habit can mean cutting a toothbrush in half, trimming foil blister packs around individual pills...