Do you refer to your dog or cat as “somebody”? As in: When you love somebody that much, you don’t mind if they slobber. In other words, is your pet a somebody or a something? Also, for centuries, there was little consistency in the...
Was English spelling standardized before the advent of the printing press? No, but there were some significant periods in history where spelling became a little more fixed. Among them are the replacing of the Runic alphabet with the Roman alphabet...
In a previous episode, five-year-old Quinn asked why the letter Q is so often followed by the letter U. A new children’s book seems to have been written just for her. Q and U Call It Quits is a funny story about the chaos that ensues for the...
Quinn from Excelsior, Minnesota, is five years old — well, five and three-quarters, as she points out. She wonders why the letter Q is so often followed by U. In Old English, the alphabet didn’t include the letter Q. The word quick, for...
In response to our conversation about pangrams, those sentences that use every letter of the alphabet at least once, Sarah McCall sent us this advice: Just mask up and be extra careful that you don’t quit always sanitizing everything. This is...
Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...