In this bonus A Way with Words minicast, Martha and Grant explore the ways foreign place names transform on official maps and in local slang. Discover the stories behind names like “Picketwire” and “Key West,” showing how history and mishearings...
We asked for your thoughts about whether cursive writing should be taught in schools — and many of you replied with a resounding “Yes!” You said cursive helps develop fine motor skills, improves mental focus, and lets you read old handtoodlewritten...
Jacuzzi and silhouette are eponyms — that is, they derive from the names of people. An Italian immigrant to California invented the bubbly hot tub called a jacuzzi. And the word silhouette commemorates a penny-pinching treasury secretary who lasted...
Will remembers coming home from kindergarten sure his class had gone to a pepper alley, though the school event was almost certainly a pep rally. Oddly enough, pepper alley is a real old slang expression: in 19th-century boxing, to be in pepper...
The phrase Lead on, Macduff, meaning “Let’s go!” or “You go on ahead and I’ll follow,” is an alteration of the famous phrase from the final scene of combat in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Bookshop|Amazon), where Macbeth lures his opponent into combat...
Nowadays we think of the gridiron as the football field, but in the 14th century, a gridiron was a cooking instrument with horizontal bars placed over an open flame. Since then, gridiron has lent its name to a Medieval torture device, the American...