To give someone a wide berth means to provide ample room. This phrase is nautical in origin, where it means “the distance ships give each other to avoid crashing.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “To Give a Wide Berth” Hello, you...
Victor Hugo’s 1874 novel Ninety-Three includes a terrifying description of a heavy cannon coming loose on board a ship, an event he calls “perhaps the most dreadful thing that can take place at sea.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to regret. And:...
Britain’s new polar research ship is named RSS Sir David Attenborough, even though an online vote overwhelmingly chose the name Boaty McBoatface. Versions of this playful construction go back at least as far as a 1987 episode of the television show...
Pipe down, meaning “shush,” comes from the days when a ship’s bosun (or bo’s’n or bos’n, also known as a boatswain), would actually blow a whistle to tell the rest of the crew that the wind had shifted or a certain action needed to take place. This...
The longer the description of an item on a menu, the more expensive it’ll likely be. In The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, Stanford University linguist Dan Jurafsky shows that with each extra letter in a menu description, the price...
