“What has a head like a cat, feet like a cat, a tail like a cat, but isn’t a cat?” Answer: a kitten! A 1948 children’s joke book has lots of these to share with kids. Plus: an easy explanation for the difference between...
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...
Van from Washington, D.C., is curious about the word fluffle, which supposedly denotes “a group of bunnies.” A friend of hers claimed to have coined this collective noun for lagomorphs along with friends at the University of Alberta in...
Jim in Sacramento, California, was reading The Good Detective (Bookshop|Amazon) by John McMahon, when he came across a description of the Georgia countryside as flatter than a gander’s arch. Just how flat was it, and what’s a...
Sue from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, wants help regarding a dispute with her husband about terms they use in a pickup sport like softball and you don’t have enough players to field a full-size team. If you get onto second base but then have to...
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...