When somebody sneezes, we say bless you or gesundheit. But suppose that person coughs. Are you supposed to say something — or are they? Plus, Mexican standoffs, gracious plenty, linguistic false friends, southpaw vs. northpaw, the slang of rabbit...
Our Quizmaster John Chaneski has quiz based on animal sounds. What sort of wild party would a sheep throw? What five-masted ship do golden retrievers sail on? Tip: For this game, animal sounds are just as important as advanced vocabularies. This is...
Where’d we get a word like skyscraper? Martha explains the image literally refers to scraping the sky, but first applied to the topmost sail on a ship, and later to tall horses, and high fly balls in baseball. There are similar ideas in other...
For 341 years, the poets laureate of Britain have all been male. That just changed with the appointment of Britain’s new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has been described as “dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest...
“You look like the wreck of the Hesperus!” It means you look “disheveled, ragged, dirty, hung over, or otherwise less than your best.” It may sound like an odd phrase, but it made perfect sense to generations of...
gulch n.— «For Glyn Willacott, there was never a dull moment aboard HMS Cardiff. The 59-year-old served as a weapons engineer between 1982 and 1985, travelling to the Falklands, the Persian Gulf and, of course, back to the ship’s home...