A savory Sicilian sausage roll is always a hit for the holidays. This dish goes by a long list of names that are equally delicious to say. Plus, why are those promotional quotes you see on the back of a book called blurbs? The guy who coined the...
Early 20th-century humorist Gelett Burgess is credited with coining the word blurb for “a bit of promotional language,” such as recommendations on a book jacket. To create a buzz for his 1906 book Are You A Bromide?, Burgess devised...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...
A 23-year-old says that since her 75-year-old dad has now retired, he’s finally ready to learn to text and share memes. What’s the best way to introduce him to the world of social media and communicating with graphics? There are several...
A listener reports that when riding with him in a car, his young daughter asked him to scroll the window down, which struck him as a creative combination of old and new — the old-fashioned expression roll down a window, and the newer scrolling...
Toshi, a 27-year-old in Dallas, Texas, wonders about differences in the way she and her parents use punctuation in text messages. When older adults send her texts using ellipses, Toshi gets a queasy feeling that it’s because they’re...