Martha Barnette gets a call from Martha Barnett, her Canadian tocaya who’s missing an “e” at the end of her last name. On the Global News website, you can see that the name Martha, perhaps now an anomaly in Canada, peaked in popularity around the...
Kevin Whitebaum of Oberlin, Ohio, has a favorite sentence from P.D. James’s A Taste for Death: “The original tenants had been replaced by the transients of the city, the peripatetic young, sharing three to a room; unmarried mothers sharing social...
When politicians, authority figures, or bureaucrats ignore those who need help, they’re said to be sitting high and looking low. This idiom, almost exclusive to the African-American community, goes back to 1970s. It’s also used in a religious sense...
Grand Bargain n.— «The harder part will be trying to follow that up by creating what is coming to be known in Obama circles as a Grand Bargain: getting everyone to agree to clean up the nation’s budget mess in a really big way, one that doesn’t...
namie n.— «“Eighty years from now, the names we choose will be the sound of a generation, the stamp of an era.” The annual list was the brainchild of a Social Security actuary who hoped to bring more citizens to the agency’s Web site. It has fueled...
namerology n.— «“Eighty years from now, the names we choose will be the sound of a generation, the stamp of an era.” The annual list was the brainchild of a Social Security actuary who hoped to bring more citizens to the agency’s Web site. It has...