During the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of volunteers helped crowdsource the Oxford English Dictionary. This venerable reference work includes citations sent in by inventors, eccentrics, scientists and educators, an Arctic explorer —...
A nurse in Jacksonville, Florida, finds that, without even being aware of it, she takes on the accent of her patients, and she wonders whether that’s because she’s in a profession where she needs to make strong connections quickly with...
Funny cat videos and cute online photos inspire equally adorable slang terms we use to talk about them. • Also, when a salamander is not a salamander, the story of an Italian term for a dish towel used halfway across the world, Bozo buttons...
Miranda, a nurse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had a patient who described her hospital food as the pits, meaning it wasn’t good. The expressions the pits and in the pits arose out of 1950s college slang, and derive from the notion of smelly...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...
Richard emails from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to share some favorite phrases from his beloved grandmother. We waited for you like one pig for another means “We got tired of waiting for you at the table and went ahead and started eating.”...