One of our favorite new reference works is The New Yale Book of Quotations (Bookshop|Amazon) edited by Fred Shapiro, associate director for collections and access at the Yale Law Library. This volume is a vastly expanded version of the previous...
Two familiar terms that have inspired lots of bogus etymologies are “dead ringer” and “spitting image.” “Dead ringer” probably comes from horse racing, where a ringer is a horse that may look like other horses in...
A Connecticut cop says his dad, a retired professor of English and comparative literature at Yale, has been reading his son’s police reports. They disagree about whether complainant is a legitimate word, or whether it should be complainer...
poor n.— «Her story is proof that elites lower the bar for poors. 5th in her class at a TTT high school, and a 1440 SAT should not be getting her into Yale.» —“Poor girl from VA struggles to fit in at YALE (feature)” by...