If you take up texting and social media late in life, there’s a lot to learn! A twenty-something wants advice getting her dad up to speed on memes, Instagram, and animated images. Plus, when you’re on a long road trip, what do you call...
A civil engineer in Boston, Massachusetts, is puzzled by part of an assignment to design a driveway that traverses a stream to access a proposed development. The wetlands scientist he’s working with informed him that he’d need to design...
The 1955 Glossary of Arctic and Subarctic Terms is a collection of scientific and indigenous terminology that’s dated, but often poetic, which describes the features of an extremely cold landscape. Among those terms are diamond dust, also...
Singing sand refers to the roaring noise or boom produced by vibrations in sand dunes. Barking sand, which makes yipping noises when you drag your feet along it, is found along coastlines in Hawaii and elsewhere. These terms are discussed in more...
A Lakeland, Florida, woman wonders about the use of the term floodin’ or flooding to describe someone wearing pants that are too short, as in, “He’s floodin.'” There are many terms for such ill-fitting pants, including flash...
What you call the space between mountains depends on which part of the country you’re in. The word gap is used more in the Southern United States, notch in the Northeast, and saddle or pass in the West. See Grant’s analysis of place...