Jimmy from Shenandoah County, Virginia, says whenever a moth flew into the room, his mother would yell “Cattle bat!” This term is almost certainly a variation of candle bat, a folk term for moths found in various English dialects. In Caribbean...
Long before Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House on the Prairie (Bookshop|Amazon), she worked as a journalist, chronicling life in the Ozarks. In one of her early writings, Wilder refers to what she calls “the famous question”:...
The 5-Minute Linguist is a book of short, accessible essays by linguists who answer the questions they commonly hear from laypersons. For example, what’s the difference between a language and a dialect? What causes someone to have a...
“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” is a Latin palindrome doubling as a riddle. It’s variously translated as “We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire” or “We turn in circles in the night and are...
Another term for moth is miller or dusty miller, so named the powdery wings of these insects recall the image of a miller — someone who grinds grain — covered in flour. That’s also the inspiration behind the name of the dusty miller plant...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has an artful quiz about, well, art. For example, remove two letters from the end of this painting’s title, and now the couple in it has been replaced by a pale young man outside a farmhouse sporting a black T-shirt...