The lovely English word stilliform, or “drop-shaped,” comes from Latin stilla, meaning “drop,” the source also of distill and instill. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Stilliform Means Drop-Shaped” I think one of the most beautiful...
Wayne in Sherman, Texas, wonders how the term pear-shaped came to describe something that’s gone badly. The expression seems to have arisen during Falklands War of the early 1980s. If you need a word for pear-shaped, there’s always pyriform, from...
Alan in Indio heard everything went pear-shaped on MythBusters and wondered why it means that things went wrong. The literal adjective pear-shaped can describe body shape or, in linguistics, vocal production, but the slang failure sense appears in...
