A monk at St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan, a Benedictine monastery in the Episcopal Church, shares some of the terms used there on a daily basis. The monks gather seven times a day to pray as a group, a practice called corporate...
Onomastics is the study of the origin and history of proper names. Many family names, such as Smith and Cook derive from occupations. That poses a conundrum for Marina Abbott from Sonoma, California: If abbots traditionally took a vow of celibacy...
Centuries ago, monks who took a vow of silence still had to communicate about everyday activities in the monastery, from gardening to equipment repair. So they developed their own hand signs, with hundreds of gestures for various words and ideas...
If you’ve ever sent a really important email and only later caught an embarrassing misspelling right there in the message header, there’s no longer any need to blame yourself. Blame Tutivillis, the medieval demon who introduced errors...
A listener asks whether English has a word for buying something and then using it for a lesser or unintended purpose, such as turning a treadmill into a clothes rack. There may not be a single English term for that, but the Japanese expression mikka...
If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...