In 1803, a shy British pharmacist wrote a pamphlet that made him a reluctant celebrity. The reason? He proposed a revolutionary new system for classifying clouds — with Latin names we still use today, like cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Also: when...
The game of baseball has alway inspired colorful commentary. Sometimes that means using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. The word stuff, for example, can refer to a pitcher’s repertoire, to the spin on a ball, or what happens to the ball...
Tory in Paulson, Wyoming, is surprised to find that many people aren’t familiar with the term bowery used to mean “an open-air pavilion.” Bowery comes from a Dutch word for “farm,” bouwerij. Today this specialized use...
In film production, the term diegetic refers to a sound that occurs within the story itself that the characters supposedly hear, whereas non-diegetic sound refers to background music or narration. For example, the tune played by the pianist in...
Kevin, a longtime vegetarian in St. Louis, Missouri, queasily recounts how he accidentally ordered sweetbreads in a fancy restaurant, thinking they were some kind of deep-fried bread, only to discover that it’s a kind of meat — a thymus gland...
There’s a new Facebook group called People for a Library-Themed Ben & Jerry’s Flavor. They say that libraries are awesome, B&J ice cream is tasty, so why not combine the two and convince Ben & Jerry’s to produce a new...