Sunny-side up eggs sometime go by the name looking at you eggs, an apparent reference to how the yolk in the middle of the egg white makes them resemble eyes. A similar idea appears in the German name, which translates as “mirror egg,” and in...
John Webster’s 1623 tragedy The Duchess of Malfi includes the memorable line: “Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near have neither heat nor light.” Much later, Stephen Crane expressed a similar idea in his poem A Man...
One way of saying someone’s a tightwad or cheapskate is to say he “has fishhooks in his pocket,” meaning he’s so reluctant to reach into his pocket for his wallet, it’s as if he’d suffer bodily injury if he did. In Australia, a similar idea is...
Starting this year, Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants not only have to spell words correctly. A controversial new rule means they’ll have to answer vocabulary questions, too. Also, when it comes to reading text, do you prefer “paper” or...
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...