A writer stumbles upon a tiny, motionless creature on a country road and, against all good advice, takes it home. The resulting memoir, Raising Hare, is a lovely meditation on nature and our relationship to it. And: have you ever invented a fake...
Cria means a baby llama or alpaca. The English word comes from Spanish cría, related to criar, “to rear” or “to raise” a young animal. The four-letter word may seem merely like a useful Scrabble play, but it’s also the everyday term for those long...
What do a baby eel, a baby salmon, a baby oyster, and a baby hare have in common? They all have names most people have never heard: elver, smolt, spat, and leveret. A cria is a baby llama or alpaca, from a Spanish word that refers to the rearing of...
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...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a double stuff puzzle in which each answer consists of two rhyming words with two syllables each. For example, what would you call food provided by God for your grandmother? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...
Why is it that what you say to your family and what they hear are different? If you say “no,” your child hears “maybe,” and if you say “maybe,” she hears “ask again and again,” and “yes” is...