Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Some of us can remember when typing an exclamation mark required hitting four different keys: the shift key, the apostrophe, the backspace, and the period! This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Typing Punctuation on Old Typewriters, The...
To get your fix of amusing typos like, “Illegally parked cars will be fine,” and other errors that can’t be mentioned on public radio, try the book Just My Typo. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Amusing Typos” Like, oh my God...
Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game using three-word phrases linked by the word and. For example, what idiom could be described literally as a country carnival found in the center of town? Hint: this phrase could also be used to describe a good...
Do you say terms like NBD, LOL, or BRB aloud in everyday speech? It sounds strange to hear spoken text lingo, but with all language, it’s only weird until it becomes the norm, and then we wonder how we did without it. That said, most of these...
Autocorrect mistakes abound, but have you ever made the errors yourself, such as typing the word buy when you meant by? Studies in Computer Mediated Communications have linked this phenomenon to the way we process words phonetically before typing...

