Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle that’s full of misspellings–only on purpose. Given a definition, you have to provide the common incorrect spelling. For example, how would you misspell the word defined by the following? “A confection made from...
English spelling seems so irregular because it preserves history instead of matching sound. Early on, this Germanic tongue absorbed Norse and French influences from invaders, and in the late 1400s, printing helped standardize early spellings just...
Do you refer to your dog or cat as “somebody”? As in: When you love somebody that much, you don’t mind if they slobber. In other words, is your pet a somebody or a something? Also, for centuries, there was little consistency in the...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...