U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s poem “In Praise of Mystery” will travel to the planet Jupiter on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. With the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America, Limon has also launched a project...
POSSLQ was devised by a worker at the U.S. Census Bureau as an acronym for Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters or Partner of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. Pronounced “possle-cue,” this term caught on briefly in the...
Chuck in Rutland, Vermont, has heard a phrase several times over the years that left him puzzled. If someone announces it’s late and they’re going to bed, and someone else questions that idea, the retiring one observes, Well, it’s...
Published in the mid-19th century, the poem “A Chapter of Ifs” elaborates at length on the phrase If ifs and ands were pots and pans. The gist is that one shouldn’t dwell upon things that may not come to pass. This is part of a...
A book of photographs and essays by famous writers celebrates libraries — and the librarians who changed their lives. Plus cutting doughnuts, spinning cookies, and pulling brodies: There are lots of ways to talk about spinning a car in circles on...
Inspired by our conversation about the word lapslock, a Berkeley, California, listener pens a funny ditty based on an E.E. Cummings poem, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” When Cummings read the original poem aloud, he recited it...