Liam from San Francisco, California, is wondering about woo-woo. How did this term come to be an adjective describing beliefs or practices considered unscientific or irrational? Woo-woo likely imitates otherworldly sounds or ghostly moans. This is...
Names don’t always mean what you think they mean. Main Street in San Francisco is named after businessman Charles Main, and Snowflake, Arizona, honors two guys named Snow and Flake. Plus, big words for small people: A colorful new book...
Names don’t always mean what you think they mean. Main Street in San Francisco is named for businessman Charles Main. Snowflake, Arizona, is named for Erastus Snow and William Jordan Flake. This is part of a complete episode.
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Liam in San Francisco, California, emailed to share a passage from Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History (Bookshop|Amazon). It’s a sensuous description of the sights, sounds, and smells of autumn in Vermont. This is part of a complete...
Anna, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, wonders if it’s okay to pronounce the word measure as ‘meɪʒər (rhyming with “hey sure”) instead of ‘mɛʒər (rhyming with “treasure”). This pronunciation is...
