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...
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...
A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems...
Among the proverbs in Leo Rosten’s Treasury of Jewish Quotations (Amazon): If you drop gold and books, pick up the books first, then the gold. This is part of a complete episode.
Quiz Guy John Chaneski is puzzling over proverbs around the world, but he asks for help remembering the last word of each. For example, he knows there’s a German proverb that translates as “A clear conscience is a soft willow.” No...