What’s the best way for someone busy to learn lots of new words quickly for a test like the GRE? Looking up their origins can help. Or, record yourself reading the words and definitions and play them back while you’re doing other chores. • Book...
A woman in Fort Worth, Texas, wonders if she’s alone in using the phrase single as a jaybird to describe herself as unpartnered. The far more common phrase is naked as a jaybird, which is of uncertain origin, but which may stem from a young jay’s...
The political terms liberal and libertarian may look similar, but they have very different meanings. Both stem from Latin liber, “free,” but the word liberal entered English hundreds of years before libertarian. This is part of a complete episode...
Have a question about objective pronouns? Whom ya gonna call? Wait–is that right? Or would it be “who ya gonna call”? “Whom” may be technically correct, but insisting on it can get you called an elitist. It’s enough to make you nervous as a polecat...
talk and die syndrome n.— «Doctors have suggested that Richardson suffered from something called “talk and die” syndrome, in which bleeding that occurs between the skull and brain stem is delayed. Patients seem fine after the trauma and may think...
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine about the late writer David Foster Wallace has Martha musing about Wallace’s stem-winding sentences, and the word stem-winder.