Kylie Ryan, an elementary-school teacher in Seattle, Washington, remembers that when she played hide-and-seek as a child, the call for everyone to come in was alle alle oxen free. Are there other versions? Yes, and because these sayings were not...
Susan from Seattle, Washington, has observed her toddler granddaughter starting to exclaim Uh-oh! when something goes amiss. Is that something she picked up from adults, or do adults pick it up from children? By 18 months, children have already...
A customer-service representative from Seattle, Washington, is curious about the phrases people use as a part of leave-taking when they’re finishing a telephone conversation. Linguists who conduct discourse analysis on such conversations say these...
You walk into a used bookstore, or pull down an old volume at the library, and there it is: The smell of old books. If you detect notes of vanilla in that intoxicating scent, there’s a reason. Also, why some people think the word awesome is...
Polyglots sometimes experience faulty language selection, accidentally reaching for words from a language different from the one they’re speaking. Listener Phoebe Liu of Seattle grew up speaking Chinese, then learned English, and studied Japanese in...
Hi! Last week, we discussed “jabronies,” “winklehawks,” “motherwit,” “purfling,” and a handy new way to say “not my problem.” We also pondered why people call their biceps “guns,” and tackled a quiz about palindromes. Several of you sent us your...