When you’re talking about the location of an inanimate object, is it okay to say that it lives there, as in The peanut butter lives in that cabinet or The flashlight lives on that shelf? Strictly speaking, of course, that object isn’t alive, but...
The expression you look like death eating on a Nab means “you look terrible.” It’s a humorous elaboration of the idea of death, which refers to death consuming a dry, salty, peanut-butter-filled snack made by the Nabisco company. The more common...
Mara, a student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo now studying at the University of North Alabama, thought Google Translate rendered the French for “peanut butter” as peanut leg. Instead of using it to translate the French word pâte, meaning...
Emily in Fort Worth, Texas, asks why a peanut is called goober, and why her sister uses the same word for homemade peanut butter and jelly swirled together. Goober comes from African languages, apparently including Bantu languages of Central and...
Some of the best things in the book Letters of Note are letters from kids to adults. One young fan’s plea to Charles Schultz that he remove a character from Peanuts was actually met with approval. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A...
Someone should write a love letter to a new book called Letters of Note. It’s a splendid collection of all kinds of correspondence through the ages: Elvis Presley fans writing to the president, children making suggestions to famous cartoonists, a...