A San Diego woman says her mother always tucked her into bed with the comforting wish, “Sweet dreams, and rest in the arms of Morpheus.” This allusion to mythology evokes a time when people were more familiar with Greek myth, and the...
A stepmother slice, according to a 1915 citation in the Dictionary of American Regional English, is a slice of bread that’s too thick to bite. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Stepmother Slice” I was just paging...
Did you ever wonder why we capitalize the pronoun “I,” but not any other pronoun? Also, the romantic story behind the term halcyon days, the origin of the phrase “like white on rice,” and the linguistic scuttlebutt on the...
In Icelandic, the term for “midwife” literally translates as “light mother.” Icelanders voted it the most beautiful word in their language. Similarly, in Spanish, the phrase for “give birth,” dar a luz, translates...
Is there a connection between the ancient Greek muse and the word amused? No. The muses were mythological figures who inspired the likes of Homer, while amuse comes from the Latin word for “staring stupidly,” as in, “to be...
Liam from Dallas, Texas, asks what to call more than one Cyclops after a game raised the problem of naming an army of one-eyed mythical monsters. The most common plural is cyclopes, pronounced sye-KLOH-peez, reflecting the word’s Greek roots in...