Novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince were very different types of artists, but they also had a lot in common. A new book chronicling their extraordinary careers becomes a larger meditation on perfectionism and creativity itself. Plus...
Dexter from San Diego, California, says his family used the word zoris for the footwear other people call flip-flops. In Japan, the word zori refers to a type of footwear made of grass or straw, and English speakers adopted this term in the early...
Our conversation about slang terms in various countries to denote someone who’s a tightwad prompts a Minnesota listener to leave a message with his favorite term along these lines. He likes to say that stingy people have alligator arms that...
You know how when two people accidentally say the same thing simultaneously, they then race to yell Jinx!? There may be hundreds of versions of this game. Anne and her young daughter Amina in Jacksonville, Florida, say versions they’ve heard...
Jack from Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, reports that in his part of the world, people sometimes inquire about a person’s last name with a question that combines the person’s first name with the phrase How Much, as in Jack How Much? This...
Nikki in Northampton, Massachusetts, disagrees with her teenage daughter about the word beef, as in to have a beef, meaning “to have a problem with someone or something.” Nikki uses the word a before the word beef, but her daughter omits...