Yvette, a biology professor in Bismarck, North Dakota, wonders why some words are more pleasurable to say than others. Among her favorites: ovoviviparous, which describes animals whose eggs hatch inside the mother’s body or shortly after being...
A hopeful Ethiopian proverb: When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. This is part of a complete episode.
Kathy from Wichita, Kansas, says her mother was a practical joker who’d laugh off her pranks by saying That’s just the kind of hairpin I am, which means “That’s just the way I am.” The phrase goes back at least to 1874...
Are the words proctor and proctologist connected? No. The word proctor, as in a university proctor who supervises or monitors students, derives from Latin procurator, from words meaning to “care for” or “advocate for,” from...
Jonathan Saha is an associate professor of history at Durham University in England. His latest book is Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Bookshop|Amazon), which chronicles how the lives of animals were irrevocably changed by...
Thanks to a project led by Professor Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University and research fellow Stephen Turton of Cambridge, you can now enjoy a trove of letters between James Augustus Henry Murray and his many correspondents during his work on what...