An artist asks strangers to write haiku about the pandemic and gets back poetic, poignant glimpses of life under lockdown. Plus, the new book Queenspotting features the colorful language of beekeeping! Bees tell each other about a good source of...
Dallas, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, wonders why we use number one and number two as euphemisms for “pee” and “poo.” This is part of a complete episode.
If you’re determined to increase the number of books you read in a year, there are lots of strategies, such as rearranging the location of your bookshelves and thinking of reading the same way you think about trying to get in 10,000 steps...
In theatrical parlance, an 11 o’clock number is a showstopping tune late in a musical, which usually coincides with the protagonist or other major character having a life-changing realization. An example would be the song “So Long...
A high-schooler in Indianapolis, Indiana, wonders why the word number is abbreviated as no. when there’s no letter O in the word. The answer lies in the Latin word numero, which is the ablative form of the Latin word for number, numerus. This...
Our conversation about slang terms for traveling by foot prompted an email from Tom in Canton, Texas, who reports that while living in Israel, he used to hear fellow high school students say in Arabic that they were taking bus number 11, the long...