Stefan Fatsis has made a career out of participatory journalism. For his book Word Freak (Bookshop|Amazon) about the world of competitive Scrabble, he became an expert player. For A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL...
Inspired by Noah Webster’s spelling reform, Quiz Guy John Chaneski came up with a puzzle that involves removing the letter U from one word to form another. For example, what two words are clued by the following statement? “I used to live in a...
A listener in Montreal, Canada, asks: How do you pronounce lieutenant? The British say LEF-ten-ant, while Americans say LOO-ten-ant. In the United States, Noah Webster insisted on the latter because it hews more closely to the word’s etymological...
Ever try to write a well-known passage in limerick form? It’s harder than you think. How about this one: “There once was a lady who’s sure / All that glitters is golden and pure/ There’s a stairway that heads up to heaven, it’s said / And the cost...
Americans pronounce the letter Z like “zee,” while those in other English-speaking countries say “zed.” That’s because Noah Webster proposed lots of Americanized pronunciations and this is one of the few that stuck. David Sacks’ book Letter Perfect...
The word fulsome has undergone some real semantic changes over the years. It used to mean “excessive, overly full” in a negative way, but it’s come to have positive connotations for some, who think it means “copious” or “abundant.” It’s a word that...