If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...
The grip on a movie set is responsible for adjusting the lights, positioning and the camera, and ensuring safety. There are various picturesque explanations for this word’s origin, but the truth is likely quite simple: it comes from the French...
The slang expression “No Tea, No Shade,” meaning “No disrespect, but …” is common in the drag community, where T means “truth.” The related phrase “All Tea, All Shade,” means “This statement is...
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Although there are many proposed etymologies for the word copacetic, the truth is no one knows the origin of this word meaning “fine” or “extremely satisfactory.” This is part of a...
Faye in Marshfield, Vermont, grew up hearing sneezing to the truth after someone sneezed, a family expression with Yiddish roots. It comes from גענאָסן צום אמת (often spelled in Latin characters as a phrase rendered as genosn tsum emes and...
The word “canvassing,” as in, going door-to-door passing out political information, has an obscure etymology. It’s thought to be related to the use of canvas material either for sifting things out or tossing someone in the air...