A retronym is a word coined to distinguish something new from an older, more generic version, such as electric guitar or clock radio. A couple of new retronyms are fine water, or “unprocessed water that reflects a region’s terroir” and water...
Ribbon fall. Gallery forest. You won’t find terms like these in most dictionaries, but they and hundreds like them are discussed by famous writers in the book Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape. The book is an intriguing collection...
In White Oleander (Bookshop|Amazon), novelist Janet Fitch touts the value of memorizing poetry with these memorable lines: Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul...
The edge of the Grand Canyon. A remote mountaintop. A medieval cathedral. Some places are so mystical you feel like you’re close to another dimension of space and time. There’s a term for such locales: thin places. And: did you ever go...
If someone urges you to spill the tea, they probably don’t want you tipping over a hot beverage. Originally, the tea here was the letter T, as in “truth.” To spill the T means to “pass along truthful information.” Plus...
Nell from Virginia Beach, Virginia, remembers her great-grandfather and her grandmother using the phrase as clean as seven waters to mean “spotlessly clean.” The word waters in this case is analogous to washes or rinses, so being cleaned...