You know that Yogi Berra quote about how Nobody ever comes here; it’s too crowded? Actually, the first person to use this was actress Suzanne Ridgeway, who appeared in several movies with The Three Stooges. A new book shows that many well...
As noted in Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Bookshop|Amazon), the term red rag, also redrag, is an old slang term for “the tongue,” as in the quotation he cites with a variant spelling of potato: Shut...
In Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Bookshop|Amazon), Oxford University scholar Katherine Rundell offers a memorable quotation about the very astonishment of being alive. This is part of a complete episode.
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.
One of our favorite new reference works is The New Yale Book of Quotations (Bookshop|Amazon) edited by Fred Shapiro, associate director for collections and access at the Yale Law Library. This volume is a vastly expanded version of the previous...