A Indianapolis, Indiana, woman remembers that her Kentucky-born grandfather used to say that a lazy person wasn’t very work-brickle. The dialectal term work-brickle is a variant of work-brittle, which, in the late 19th century, described...
Hyperbolic Headlines Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity!!!! Or maybe not. You’ve seen those breathless headlines on the internet, like “You Won’t Believe What This 7-year-old Said to The President!” They’re supposed to...
The word peruse is such a confusing term that it’s best to avoid it entirely. Some English speakers were taught it means “to read casually,” while others were taught exactly the opposite. This is part of a complete episode...
Is the term “Oriental” offensive? Where do we get the phrase “not one iota”? Why do we tell someone to “take a gander”? And who coined the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
Evan in Madison, Wisconsin, learned that peruse means to read closely and carefully but keeps hearing it used for a quick skim. The older sense was even stronger, meaning to use thoroughly, use up, or exhaust, and then later to pore over a text long...