People might never know that quality jazz exists outside the city of Baton Rouge. Which may be true—but it’s also a pangram. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A Quality Jazz Pangram” People might never know that quality jazz exists...
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 countries have strict laws about naming babies. New Zealand authorities, for example, denied a request to name some twins Fish and Chips. • Halley’s Comet seen centuries before English astronomer Edmund Halley ever spotted it. That’s an example...
A Montreal, Canada, woman wonders why sometimes in old manuscripts the letter s looks like the letter f. A great resource on this topic is Andrew West’s blog Babelstone. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Why Did They Write the...
A musician from Youngstown, Ohio, is designing an album cover for his band’s latest release. He wants to use a grawlix, one of those strings of punctuation marks that substitute for profanity. “Beetle Bailey” cartoonist Mort Walker coined the term...
You walk into a used bookstore, or pull down an old volume at the library, and there it is: The smell of old books. If you detect notes of vanilla in that intoxicating scent, there’s a reason. Also, why some people think the word awesome is...
