Todd of Port Jefferson, New York, is looking for a positive term that goes beyond the absence of bias: not merely “un-hate,” tolerance, or colorblindness, but active kinship, curiosity, and regard across difference. One candidate is allophilia...
Disgruntled means “unhappy,” and gruntled means the opposite, although you almost never hear the latter. Playing with such unpaired words can be irresistible, whether you’re a poet or an essayist for The New Yorker. This is part of a complete...
Alone looks as if it might have something to do with Zen Buddhist all one, but its English history points elsewhere. Art from San Diego wondered about the contrast, since all one can suggest a state of connectedness, while alone means being by...
Tony from Blacksburg, Virginia, asks why a meeting that gets pushed back is usually postponed to a later time, even though the phrase can sound as if it should mean moved earlier. The confusion depends on how speakers picture time moving along a...
Do pregnant women enjoy pickles and ice cream? Linguists from the American Dialect Society have been discussing this recently. They found that the expression pickles and ice cream once referred simply to the conjoining of two unrelated things, sort...
In the U.K., they don’t count seconds as “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi,” because, well, they have no Mississippi. Instead, they say “one-elephant, two-elephant.” Lynne Murphy, author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, points out this...