“Mnemonic,” a poem by Brian Bilston, cleverly sums up what many of us feel about the month of January. It’s included in his latest book, Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems (Bookshop|Amazon), and shared...
A taciturn gumshoe in Robert B. Parker’s detective novel Bye Bye Baby (Bookshop|Amazon) offers this good advice: “Never say anything that doesn’t improve the silence.” This is part of a complete episode.
Listeners in Bogotá, Colombia, share a favorite Spanish saying, Son como uña y mugre, which literally means “They’re like fingernail and dirt.” It refers to people who are especially close to each other, which English-speakers...
Marissa in Tallahassee, Florida, is puzzled when a friend observes that coffee goes through her like salts through a widow-woman, meaning that the beverage makes its way swiftly through her digestive system. The expression, which has been around...
Members of our Facebook group are inventing funny names for Greek gods by mispronouncing familiar words with the accent on the wrong syllable, such as Episodes /eh-PIH-suh-deez/, god of continuing stories, and Lemonades /leh-moe-NAH-deez/, god of...
The new play English by Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi powerfully evokes the challenges and rewards and changes involved in struggling to gain fluency in another language. Reviewing the play in the The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz...