We use the term Milky Way for that glowing arc across the sky. But how people picture it varies from culture to culture. In Sweden, that starry band goes by a name that means “Winter Street,” and in Hawaii, a term for the Milky Way...
Martha in Portland, Oregon, has long joked about having an imaginary boyfriend named Raoul. Then she discovered that two friends of hers also joke about their own imaginary boyfriend named Raoul. Then a third friend told her about yet another woman...
Vanessa, who is originally from New Zealand, jokingly calls her American boyfriend a wally, an adjective that means “silly,” “daft,” or “inept.” Heard in much of the United Kingdom, this term may be related to the...
Kate from Arlington, Massachusetts, and her boyfriend disagree about how to pronounce biopic. The confusion arises in part because the -opic at the end looks like the ends of words like myopic and microscopic. It’s actually a shortening of the...
We heard from a woman who told her boyfriend about her plan to get her hair cut. He responded that he thought that particular style would make her hair “worse.” Does the word worse in this case imply that her hair was bad to begin with...
Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski, who belongs to the National Puzzlers’ League, brought us a game inspired by the league’s newsletter. In this game, based on head-to-tail shifts, the first letter of a word moves to the back to form a new word, so if...