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Vigesimal

If you know someone with a 20th birthday coming up, you’ll want to tuck this word away in your pocket: vigesimal. It means “having to do with the number 20,” and comes from Latin vigesimus, or “twentieth,” a relative of...

Episode 1495

Cool Your Soup

According to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, it’s important to master the basics of writing, but there comes a time when you have to strike out on your own and teach yourself. Also: Spanish idioms involving food, a conversation about the...

Episode 1596

Excuse the Hogs

When a teenager went a week without talking as part of a school project, he noticed a surprising side effect: Instead of rehearsing a response to what other people were saying to him, he was focused on listening — and feeling smarter as a result...

Episode 1611

By a Landslide

How do you transform ancient Chinese script for use in the modern age? English uses a keyboard with just 26 letters, but the first Chinese typewriter looked like a small table under a huge disk with more than 4,000 characters. A new book chronicles...

Vouching for Your Good Name

If you vouch for something, you guarantee that what you’re saying is true. In the early 14th century, vouch was a transitive verb that meant “to summon into court to prove a title.” Vouch was adapted into English from an Old French...

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