Teaching our children, and some advice for writers. Suppose your child is eager to tackle a difficult subject–ancient Greek, for example–but you know his reach exceeds his grasp? The challenge is to support the child’s curiosity...
I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth goes back to the 18th century. The quip appears in Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation, published around 1738, and in the 1811 slang dictionary Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Gail...
Adam in Indianapolis grew up with his grandmother’s warning not to split a pole, meaning that two companions shouldn’t pass on opposite sides of a lamppost, mailbox, or other street obstacle. The idea is that the physical separation hints at an...