Language is always evolving, and that’s also true for American Sign Language. A century ago, the sign for “telephone” was one fist below your mouth and the other at your ear, as if you’re holding an old-fashioned candlestick...
Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap...
Slatch, a 17th- and 18th-century word, means a brief respite or interval, especially a short spell of weather. It appears in the example, We must wait for a slatch of fair weather, and it is a nice companion to the British forecast phrase bright...
Byron in Florence, South Carolina, is curious about his grandmother’s expression might as well, can’t dance, which she used when someone suggested an activity. This saying, as well as longer versions, are rooted in the idea of weather...
In Japan, if you want to order a corndog, you ask for an Amerikan doggu (アメリカンドッグ). These types of coinages are called wasei-eigo, or “Japanese-made English,” and there are lots of them. Plus, there’s an atmospheric optical...
When an archaeological curator discovered pages of strange code in a secret pocket inside a vintage dress, it set off a years-long search to decipher the seemingly unrelated lists of words. The mystery was solved in 2018, when a researcher at the...