If you work in tech support, you might use snarky slang for problems caused by computer users themselves. There’s the acronym PEBCAK, for example, which stands for Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard. And: a lush poem about the sea inspired by...
The first person on your street to put out the trash and recycling? That’s your street’s binfluencer, a combination of bin and influencer. In the UK, this term is sometimes used to denote someone who encourages recycling and waste reduction. In the...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
The new book Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Bookshop|Amazon) is a fascinating history about the colorful characters who attempted to reinvent the complicated Chinese script to adapt it for use with modern...
A listener in Plaza, North Dakota, says he tried to signal some teenagers to lower their car window by moving his fist in a circle, but since they grew up with push-button window controls, they didn’t understand the gesture. What’s the...
For the book lover on your gift list, Grant recommends the mix of magic and science in All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. He also likes the work of Firoozeh Dumas: It Ain’t So Awful Falafel, about an Iranian teenage girl living...