Shaun Usher has collected many marvelous epistles in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (Bookshop|Amazon). One of them, from E. B. White, is a thoughtful letter of encouragement urging the reader to “wind the clock...
After our conversation about how to communicate an apology to another driver while on the road, Vasiliy in Waltham, Massachusetts, composed a poem about it. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A Poem to Apologize to Other...
In Brazil, if you want to talk about going someplace quickly and coming back in a flash, you can use the idiomatic Portuguese phrase ir num pé e voltar no outro, literally “to go on one foot and return on the other.” This is part of a...
Richard emails from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to share some favorite phrases from his beloved grandmother. We waited for you like one pig for another means “We got tired of waiting for you at the table and went ahead and started eating.”...
Gerald from Gaspee Point, Rhode Island, wants to know the story behind the term dashboard. Originally a dashboard was wood or leather placed at the front in horse-drawn vehicles to keep the driver and passengers from being dashed with mud, water, or...
Tabitha from Palmer, Alaska, grew up hearing her mother from southern Missouri say Stop wooling me! when a restless child was squirming on her lap. The verb wool, as in wooling someone or wooling a baby around, has been heard in parts of the South...