Snuba is a portmanteau — a combination of snorkel and scuba — and refers to snorkeling several feet underwater while breathing through a long hose that’s attached to an air supply float on a raft. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Sam in Burlington, Vermont, wondered whether fraught can stand alone, as in This situation is fraught, after years of hearing fraught with peril or fraught with worry. The word is related to freight and originally had to do with loading a ship, then...
Remember the olden days of 2007, when Amazon first introduced the Kindle? Oprah named it her Favorite New Gadget. Some people thought e-readers signaled the death of hardback books, but as Nicholas Carr notes in the Wall Street Journal, only 16% of...
Greg Pliska’s game Double Definition uses a cryptic-crossword trick: each clue gives two meanings that point to the same word, with no separate wordplay half. A clue such as trim a tree splits neatly in two, and crazy flying mammals works the same...