When writing textbooks about slavery, which words best reflect its cold, hard reality? Some historians are dropping the word slave in favor of terms like enslaved person and captive, arguing that these terms are more accurate. And raising a...
Some of us can remember when typing an exclamation mark required hitting four different keys: the shift key, the apostrophe, the backspace, and the period! This is part of a complete episode.
Gifts for book lovers: Martha recommends one for lovers of libraries and another for students of Spanish. Grant suggests some enchanting novels for young readers. When it comes to books, though, you can’t always judge them by their original...
Pity all the fellows named Colin whose name is often mispronounced to rhyme with the punctuation mark (or the body part). General Colin Powell’s rise to public prominence in the 1980’s apparently prompted many people to adopt his unusual...
A musician from Youngstown, Ohio, is designing an album cover for his band’s latest release. He wants to use a grawlix, one of those strings of punctuation marks that substitute for profanity. “Beetle Bailey” cartoonist Mort Walker...
The books we love as children may influence our careers more than we realize. As a child, Martha was fascinated with stories of cracking codes, and Grant loved books with glossaries–not that far from the kind of work they do today. A caller...