The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
A French idiom that means “to sleep in” or “lie around lazily in bed after waking” is faire la grasse matinée, literally to “make the fat morning.” If you fall in love easily, you’re said to have un coeur...
Following up on our conversation about whether cursive handwriting should be taught in schools, 23-year-old Rachel from Newport News, Virginia, wrote to say she learned cursive in third grade, but has never used it since. This is part of a complete...
After noting how similar the word genre sounds to his own first name, Quiz Guy John Chaneski crafted a quiz that involves replacing the letters gen- with John- to form an entirely new word. For example, he says, from now on when you talk about a...
Billennials, or bilingual millennials, is a new term being bandied about by marketers and television programmers who’ve realized that young Americans who grew up in Spanish-speaking homes don’t necessarily care for the traditional...
