What does the expression egg on have to do with chickens? Nothing, actually. Martha explains why, and tells the story of how the term curate’s egg came to mean “something with both good and bad characteristics.”
Chickens give more than eggs, meat, and feathers—they give language!
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.
Martha explains how experiments with dead frogs and live wires led to the invention of the battery, and inspired a couple of familiar English words.
What does dog hair have to do with hangover cures? Also, where’d we ever get a word like “dude”? And what’s the word for when unexpected objects form a recognizable image, like a cloud that looks like a bunny, or the image of Elvis...
Time for another linguistic mystery. Where would you be if you decided to go twacking around duckish, and then you came home and wrote about it in a scribbler?