The new Downton Abbey movie is a luscious treat for fans of the public-television period piece, but how accurate is the script when it comes to the vocabulary of the early 20th century? It may be jarring to hear the word swag, but it was already at...
The new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Bookshop|Amazon) is a fascinating history about the colorful characters who attempted to reinvent the complicated Chinese script to adapt it for use with modern...
Polly, a library worker in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, wonders about the correct term for the fuzzy puffball atop a warm hat. Is it a tribble or a pompom? The word tribble first appeared in the classic Star Trek episode “The...
When does a word’s past make it too sensitive to use in the present? In contra dancing, there’s a particular move that dancers traditionally call a gypsy. But there’s a growing recognition that many people find the term gypsy...
In a nutshell refers to something that’s “put concisely,” in just a few words. The phrase goes all the way back to antiquity when the Roman historian Pliny described a copy of The Iliad written in such tiny script that it could fit...
What’s in YOUR spice rack? Say you’re cooking up a pot of chili, and you need to add more of that warm, earthy, powdered spice. Do you reach for a bottle of KOO-min? KYOO-min? Or are you going to add KUMM-in? The pronunciation given in...