Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
Diamond dust, tapioca snow, and sugar icebergs — a 1955 glossary of arctic and subarctic terms describes the environment in ways that sound poetic. And a mom says her son is dating someone who’s non-binary. She supports their relationship, but...
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle this week involves pig Latin, a.k.a. Ig-pay Atin-lay. One of two answers to each clue is a regular English word, and the other is its pig Latin version. For example, what regular English word and its pig Latin...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been shopping at stores with misleading names. For example, he might buy baked goods from a bakery, but if he were to visit a store that sells flying mammals, he might assume it has something to do with power cells. What...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been thinking a lot about it—that is, how the presence or absence of the letters I-T can clue different words. Each of this puzzle’s sentences suggests one word containing the letters I-T, and a second word...