Leonor from Dallas, Texas, says that when she was a child, her Spanish-speaking mother and grandmother used to her after a bump or scrape with Sana, sana, colita de rana, Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana , literally, “Heal, heal, little frog’s tail...
Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock, for...
Megan in Monticello, Florida, is bothered by on tomorrow, as in We can do that on tomorrow, because on sounds redundant to her. Rather than being a simple grammatical error, the phrasing is a well-documented dialect feature in parts of the US South...
Have a question about objective pronouns? Whom ya gonna call? Wait–is that right? Or would it be “who ya gonna call”? “Whom” may be technically correct, but insisting on it can get you called an elitist. It’s enough to make you nervous as a polecat...
A veteran broadcaster recalls a brilliant example of sesquipedalian language. Fifty years ago, he stubbed his foot on the beach and a group of college boys told him to go to his parents and get an anatomical juxtaposition of the orbicular ors...
Grant has a riddle: “I never was, am always to be, no one ever saw me or ever will, and yet I am the confidence of all to live and breathe on this terrestrial ball. What am I?” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “”I Never Was” Riddle”...
