Kirsten in Evanston, Illinois, reports that when she and her husband lived in a co-op at the University of Michigan, they and their friends used the acronym GUFF for “general use free food,” which anyone was free to eat. The word GUFF proved so...
The Detroit Free Press reported recently that a man invented and trying to popularize a term for nieces and nephews, although it’s clear that the word sofralia has an uphill battle. English doesn’t have a specific, fixed term for those relatives...
Creative communication in a noisy world! Writing a clever 140-character tweet isn’t easy. But you know what’s even more impressive? Working all 26 letters of the alphabet into just one sentence! The term for that type of sentence is pangram...
An election official in Arcata, California, wonders how the “/” symbol should be pronounced on ballots for the visually impaired. The symbol is becoming more and more popular as a kind of conjunction. In the U.K., they call it a stroke, or virgule...
Is master a gender-neutral title? James from Seattle, Washington, hosts a local pub quiz night, where he’s known as the Quizmaster. But, he wonders, would it be appropriate to call a woman a Quizmaster? Of course! Many titles, like Postmaster or...
What’s so cool about bees’ knees, anyway? The bee’s knees, a phrase meaning “cool” or “great,” dates back to the flapper era of the 1920s. It relates to an old definition of the word “cute,” referring to something small and nicely formed. The knees...