Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap...
Nancy in Newport, Kentucky, says friends used to refer to her young son and daughter as a pigeon pair. Doves and pigeons tend to have two chicks at a time, and at one point, it was believed that these offspring consisted of one male and female...
An ornithologist says there’s a growing movement to change the name of a pink-footed bird currently called the flesh-footed shearwater. The movement reflects a growing understanding that using flesh-colored for “pink” fails to...
Steven in Wilmington, North Carolina, is curious about the terms hankering and unbolted cornmeal. The noun hankering, meaning “a strong desire for something,” is related to the verb “to hang,” as in “hanging...
In How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College, points out that William Shakespeare never had what we might think of as an “English class.” Instead, he was taught...
Evelyn in Wilmington, North Carolina, says that when she and her older sister were sassy to their parents, her mother would say either You’re getting too big for your britches or I’m going to bring you down a buttonhole lower. The former...