According to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, it’s important to master the basics of writing, but there comes a time when you have to strike out on your own and teach yourself. Also: Spanish idioms involving food, a conversation about the...
A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems...
Vince from Brooklyn, New York, remembers growing up there and using the expression cut a chogi! to mean “beat it!” or “get away from here!” He’d assumed it was simply Brooklynese until years later in Alabama, when he...
Mara, a student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo now studying at the University of North Alabama, thought Google Translate rendered the French for “peanut butter” as peanut leg. Instead of using it to translate the French word...
Two examples of adynaton, the rhetorical term for playful exaggeration suggesting that something will never happen, involve animals’ tails. One German expression translates as “It’ll happen when the hounds start barking with their...
The German neologism Coronafussgruss literally translates as “Corona foot greeting,” a term for the socially distanced alternative to handshakes. This is part of a complete episode.