How colors got their names, and a strange way to write. The terms blue and orange arrived in English via French, so why didn’t we also adapt the French for black and white? • Not every example of writing goes in one direction across the page...
What is the letter H doing in the English word ghost? The answer has to do with 15th-century Flemish typesetters working for the English printer William Caxton. They often added an H after an initial hard G to reflect the spelling of cognates in...
Jase in Austin, Texas, knows that hickey means a “love bite” or “mark left on the skin,” and doo-hickey refers to a small object that the speaker can’t recall the name of, but why would anyone refer to a hickey in the...
A step-and-repeat is the sponsor-studded banner or wall that serves as a backdrop for photographs at event. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Step and Repeat” I learned a term the other day, step and repeat. Do you know...
Stereotyped notice in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass points back to printing, not to a social generalization. Sidney from Indianapolis, Indiana, noticed the phrase in Douglass’s line about a meeting called under the...
“Cutting a check” is a far more common phrase than “tearing off a check,” because for years checks weren’t perforated, so bankers had to actually use a metal device to cut them. This is part of a complete episode...