Quiz Guy John Chaneski is pondering the degrees offered by various colleges and universities — or at least, the degrees those institutions should offer, considering their names. For example, at what Ivy League school might you expect a course in...
Every tub on its own bottom suggests that every person or entity in a group should be self-sufficient. This idiom, often abbreviated to ETOB, is common in academic speech to mean that each department or school should be responsible for raising its...
Megan from East Hampton, New York, asks why an elementary school is sometimes called a grammar school when pupils study far more than grammar. The name reaches back to medieval church and monastery schools, or scolae grammaticales, where Latin...
Vaccines take their name from vaccinia, the virus that caused cowpox. It was the original ingredient used to vaccinate people against smallpox. Stefan Riedel, a pathologist at the Baylor University Medical Center, offers a detailed history of the...
A fifth-year senior? That term is so 2007. These days, college students just refer to that extra year of school as taking a victory lap. Grant shares this and other examples of campus slang collected by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill...
Greetings, Murphys and Melvins and wedgies, oh my! In this week’s archive episode, we talk about these and other terms for that cruel prank that involves a yank. Also, funny Facebook groups for grammar lovers, the difference between “bring” and...