In his delightful memoir Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World (Bookshop|Amazon), Christian Cooper introduces the vocabulary of birding, including the term warbler neck, an affliction among fellow birders. Cooper...
Think you know Downton Abbey? Try using the Up-Goer Five Text Editor to describe the plot using the thousand most common words in English! Your description probably won’t sound much like the Dowager Countess. This is part of a complete episode...
Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? (Or a jaboney, jadroney, jambone, jiboney, gibroni, gibroney, gabroney, jobroni, jobrone, etc.) Grant traces this playful insult, meaning a “rube” or “loser,” to the 1920s, when Italian...
It’s always fun to catch moviemakers’ blunders. Say you’re watching an epic about ancient Rome and spot a toga-clad extra who forgot to remove his wristwatch. That’s an anachronism. But what do you call something that’s geographically incorrect...
Why do we say someone is making money hand over fist? Does it have to do with two competitors putting one hand over the other on a baseball bat to determine who’s up first? Or does it have to do with pulling a rope? This is part of a complete...
Need a word for “lover of the underdog”? It’s infracaninophile. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Infracaninophile” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, I’m Kate Rosenmeier and I’m calling from Evansville, Indiana. Hi, Kate...
