The English word stilliform means “drop-shaped,” from Latin stilla, meaning “drop.” The same drippy root turns up in distill, “to drip down,” and instill, “to put in drop by drop,” and the spelling stilliform even has a row of tall, narrow letters...
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...
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...
