Quiz Guy John Chaneski insists that the names of modern Olympic sports resulted from changing one letter in the original names for each activity. For example, he says, the pole vault must have originated from an earlier sport in which participants...
If you don’t have anything nice to say, say it like Shakespeare: Thou unhandsome smush-mouthed mush-rump! Thou obscene rug-headed hornbeast! The Shakespeare Insult Generator helps you craft creative zingers by mixing and matching the Bard’s own...
Don’t capitalize names of seasons unless they’re part of a proper noun, such as Summer Olympics or Spring Formal. Unlike the names of months and days of the week, seasons aren’t eponymous, meaning they don’t derive from proper names. This is part of...
A bunch of English words actually take from the names of old places: peach comes from Persia, bungalow refers to a house “of the Bengal type,” and laconic refers to the region of Sparta famous as a place where people valued speech that was brief and...
What’s in YOUR spice rack? Say you’re cooking up a pot of chili, and you need to add more of that warm, earthy, powdered spice. Do you reach for a bottle of KOO-min? KYOO-min? Or are you going to add KUMM-in? The pronunciation given in dictionaries...
John Chaneski’s Word Olympics quiz is a pantheon of wordplay events, with medals optional and pedantry encouraged. Clues range from two-letter Scrabble-legal surprise sounds to the name for grotesque stone figures that don’t channel rainwater, plus...
