Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Jesse from Louisville, Kentucky, wonders if the second-person plural pronoun y’all is becoming more popular throughout the United States. A 2000 article in the Journal of English Linguistics finds that y’all and you-all are indeed spreading beyond...
Years ago, Derek from Omaha, Nebraska, adopted the greeting howdy, but his wife says it sounds too uncultured. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of English Linguistics by Lauren Hall Lew and Nola Stephens describe howdy as a term that is enregistered...
New research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that people who speak more than one languagetend to be less superstitious if they’re reading or thinking in a different language. This is part of a complete...
What the fox says may be a mystery, but we do know that dogs bark differently around the world. In China, for example, they say not bow-wow but wang wang. Also, the story behind the British tradition of scrumping. It’s not a middle...
The Western Folklore Journal of 1976 gives us such romantic phrases as “kisses like a cold fish,” “kisses like your brother through a screen,” and “kisses like a wet brick.” This is part of a complete episode.