Lisa from Paris, Kentucky, grew up eating a German Christmas cookie at a friend’s house in Miami, Florida. This deep-fried, bow-tie-shaped pastry was made with butter, lemon, and rum, and dusted with powdered sugar. The family called them...
How do you pronounce the word mobile, as in the toy that hangs above a baby’s crib? In the United States, that kind of mobile is pronounced MOH-beel, but in the United Kingdom, it’s MOH-byle. In the early 1930s, the American sculptor Alexander...
How did the term Bohemian come to be associated with literary and artistic nonconformists who live outside mainstream society? In the early 19th century, the French term La bohème was applied to the Romani people, also known as the Roma, a...
Before her biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Bookshop|Amazon), Katherine Rundell was better known as a writer of children’s books, including The Girl Savage (Bookshop|Amazon) and Rooftoppers (Bookshop|Amazon). The...
For German speakers, Sauregurkenzeit is that period of time in late summer when nothing much is happening, known in English as the dog days. The German term derives from sauer, “sour,” and Gurke “cucumber,” plus Zeit or...
There are places in the world where the walls of reality seem weak and another dimension seems nearer and clearer than usual, leaving you without words. Perhaps you’ve had that experience on top of a mountain, or at the edge of the Grand...