There are word nerds, and then there’s the woman who set up a folding chair on sidewalks throughout the country, cheerfully dispensing tips about grammar. She recounts her adventures in a new book. And the story of the brilliant pioneer of...
An industrial-design student in Savannah, Georgia, uses Boolean software for making 3-D renderings. Why Boolean ? The term honors the brilliant autodidact George Boole, who helped pioneer the use of binary computing language and Boolean logic. This...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...
A 1946 article in the California Folklore Quarterly features a collection of folks sayings from a pioneer family in Western Oregon, including this phrase to describe the one person in town who seems to know everybody’s business: He knew...
dollar-a-year man n.— «Before his death in 1955, the Pictou-born man was one of the country’s top corporate lawyers, known for driving around the streets of Halifax in the city’s first Rolls-Royce limousine. During the Second World War...
slug pub n.— «A dish of beer, which Conrad and Petterson like to call the “slug pub,” does away with the slimy critters. “The slugs are attracted to the beer, and they die happy.”» —“Gardeners keepin’ it...