How do actors bring Shakespeare’s lines to life so that modern audiences immediately understand the text? One way is to emphasize the names of people and places at certain points. That technique is called billboarding. And: Anyone for an...
Erin grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, but when she moved to New York City, she found that people often told her she pronounces Erin as if it’s spelled like the masculine name Aaron. Has Erin been pronouncing her own name wrong all these years...
Have you ever googled your own name and found someone else who has the very same moniker? There’s a word for that: Googleganger, a play on the word doppelganger, from German words that literally mean “double goer.” This is part of...
James from Trabuco Canyon, California, learns that there’s a proper way to spell the letters of the alphabet. The letter J is spelled jay and H is spelled aitch. His own name would be spelled out as jay aye em ee ess. The letter Y is spelled...
If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...
What do you call the cardboard roll inside a roll of toilet paper? Many families have their own name for it, including der der and oh-ah, oh-ah. This is part of a complete episode.