Alan from Omaha, Nebraska, finds himself turning nouns into verbs, telling his daughter he’s glad she’s old enough to start to human and using jenga as a verb to refer to arranging items carefully, after the game Jenga, which involves removing...
Nadine in San Antonio, Texas, disagrees with her boyfriend, who insists that the word surprise suggests something inherently good, so it’s impossible to call something a bad surprise. A quick look at data from the Brigham Young University corpora of...
Is a number a noun or an adjective? Even dictionary editors struggle with how to classify parts of speech. Like color, such words often lie along a spectrum, and asking at what point the number seven goes from a noun to an adjective is like asking...
Where does the phrase jonesing for come from? Heroin addicts first introduced the expression in the early 1960s, but like many bits of slang, it soon left its original subculture and entered the mainstream vernacular. There’s no evidence to support...
A listener has a question about emoticons, those little sideways symbols you type to suggest emotions in informal electronic writing. You know, like using a colon, dash, and a capital P to stick out your tongue like this 😛 or using a colon, dash...
This week Puzzle Guy Greg Pliska presented a quiz called Categorical Allies. He gave a word and Martha and Grant had to come up with the second word that was in the same category as the first and began with the same two letters that the first one...