Jodi, a native of California’s Central Valley, grew up using the word erp (or urp or earp) for vomiting—only to discover as a child that no one outside her family had heard it. The Dictionary of American Regional English documents urp as...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle that’s full of misspellings–only on purpose. Given a definition, you have to provide the common incorrect spelling. For example, how would you misspell the word defined by the following? “A confection made from...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski takes inspiration for this week’s puzzle from cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle and his aliens from Strange Planet (Bookshop|Amazon), whose ultra-literal phrasing makes familiar experiences sound oddly technical and new. For example...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been in his laboratory experimenting with what he calls letter mitosis, creating new words by splitting a pair of vowels. For example, if he splits off an O from coop, he gets an entirely new word, cop. In this puzzle, all...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s latest side gig is writing anthems for nations that exist only in his imagi-Nation. For example, what “nation” might celebrate itself with the following stanza? In mathematics, it’s an arrangement of elements into various...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski calls this week’s puzzle “Three of a Kind, Four of a Kind,” but it has nothing to do with cards. The challenge is to find words that have either three occurrences of a letter or four. For example, if the letter in question is...