A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems, lyrics, and much...
Joe, a retired astronomer in Tucson, wonders where odds in What are the odds? comes from. It traces back to odd as the opposite of even: if one stack of coins differs from otherwise equal stacks, it is the odd one. From that sense of difference or...