What’s so cool about bees’ knees, anyway? The bee’s knees, a phrase meaning “cool” or “great,” dates back to the flapper era of the 1920s. It relates to an old definition of the word “cute,”...
Why do we call our biceps guns? The slang lexicographer Jonathon Green suggests that the metaphor first pops up in baseball around the 1920s, when players referred to their throwing arms as guns. Believe it or not, the early baseball pitchers...
Crescendo is not the high point of a sound, at least in the strict musical sense. Linda from Fort Worth, Texas, a retired symphony bassoonist, notes that a crescendo is the increase in volume or intensity, whether written out, abbreviated, or shown...