Charlotte from Princeton, Kentucky, wonders: What’s the difference between a spider web and a cobweb? There’s a bit of semantic differentiation between the two: A cobweb is usually an old spider web, while a spider web that’s not...
A.J. Jacobs’ book The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life (Amazon|Bookshop) includes this brain teaser translated from Swahili: I am a house without a door. This is part...
A riddle from an old folklore collection, traced to Kirksville, Missouri, around the turn of the 20th century: “Within a fountain crystal clear / A golden apple doth appear / No doors or locks to this stronghold / Yet thieves break in and steal the...
A sixth-grade teacher from San Antonio, Texas, says he and his students are reading The Lord of the Rings. They’re curious about the words attercop, which means “spider” (and a relative of the word cobweb) and Tomnoddy, which means...
What a difference pronunciation makes! The United States has a Department of Defense, and an individual might take classes in self-defense. So why do football and basketball coaches say they’re proud of their . . . “DEE-fence?”...
Cobwebs are spiderwebs, especially the dusty, abandoned kind that need sweeping away. Middle English coppe or cop meant “spider” or “round thing,” and cob survives mostly in this compound. A related old word, attercop, combines a word for “poison”...