If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
Images of birds flutter inside lots of English words and phrases, from “nest egg” and “pecking order,” to proverbs from around the world—including a lovely Spanish saying about how birds sense light just before dawn. Plus...
In English, you might describe something easy to do as a cinch or a piece of cake. Several other languages employ tasty metaphors to convey a similar idea. In Brazilian Portuguese, you something easy can be described with an idiom that translates as...
Good poetry is even better when you read it aloud. For his anthology, Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky selected works with just that in mind. Martha and Grant discuss a poem from the...