Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
The term nebby, meaning meddlesome or nosy, literally derives from the word neb, or “nose,” a term that’s been around in English for more than a thousand years. Despite what you might guess, nebby is unrelated to the Yiddish word nebbish, meaning “a...
The months of September, October, November, and December take their names from Latin words meaning “seven,” “eight,” “nine,” and “ten.” So why don’t their names correspond to where they fall in...
A caller named Emily from Fishers, Indiana, wondered about nebby, a word she uses to mean picky and that her Michigan friends use to mean gossipy. In Western Pennsylvania, where the word is especially common, nebby means nosy or snooping, and it...
You’ve noticed work seems to expand to fill the time given to complete it. But did you know there’s a term for that? Also this week, the New England exclamation “So don’t I!,” grey vs. gray, building storeys, being...
Julia in central Indiana grew up hearing nibby for someone who snoops or gets into other people’s business. The more common spelling is nebby, a Western Pennsylvania term that fits her family’s earlier move from Pennsylvania into Ohio and Indiana...