Ronald in Columbia, South Carolina, hears some people pronounce the word help as if they’re saying hope. There’s a British dialectal version of the past tense of the verb help that is spelled holp or holpen or hope, which have hung on in pockets of...
Kolin in Los Angeles, California, says his friend Helen is known for writing witty tweets that go viral, such as one about the difference between men’s and women’s midlife crises. He says she credits her success in part to her use of assonance, or...
How do you pronounce Missouri? Is it /miz-URR-ee/ or /miz-URR-uh/? There are actually four distinct pronunciations of this word. Linguist Donald Lance of the University of Missouri-Columbia studied the history of this name extensively and found that...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has crafted this puzzle with eeeeeeeease. In fact, all the answers are combinations of words that include only one vowel sound — a long E. For example, suppose the clue is It’s what some people say the moon is made of, and...
All the answers to this puzzle from Quiz Guy John Chaneski are two-word phrases, and the only vowel they contain is the letter A. For example, suppose John is lounging in a shaded spot where only one variety of fruit is allowed. Where is he? This is...
Barney from Carmel, Indiana, says his family always used the term schniddles to refer to teeny bits of detritus left on the table after snipping paper snowflakes. It’s most likely a variant of schnibbles, a far more common term for “scraps,” or...
