Andy, a listener in Fairbanks, Alaska, has always referred to a stiff neck as a crick, so he was surprised when he heard a high school football coach from Missouri complain of a creak in his neck and justified the pronunciation with creaky. In North...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski says that lately he’s been thinking a lot about Greece for some reason. So his puzzle this week is based on the Greek alphabet. Each clue’s blank must be filled by a word or phrase that sounds like the name of a Greek letter...
Carpe diem! A new book reveals the surprisingly unfamiliar stories behind familiar quotations. Also: Rock climbers have gumbies, and surfers have kooks. What do those words say about beginners who have more confidence than experience? Plus, if...
Default as a noun and default as a verb are the same word, with a familiar English stress shift: nouns often take first-syllable stress, while verbs often take second-syllable stress, as with the different pronunciations of record. A New York City...
If you mistype something, that’s a typo. But what do you call it when your voice-to-text program mistypes as you’re dictating? Is that a mico, as in microphone? Plus, the word sycophant has a long and surprising history that goes all the way back to...
How do you pronounce Henry David Thoreau’s last name? It’s not “thur-ROH” but “THUR-roh,” as if pronounced like the word thorough, with the accent on the first syllable. The author of Walden (Bookshop|Amazon) had a French grandfather who was...
