Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...
Barry Lopez was the author of Arctic Dreams (Bookshop|Amazon),winner of the National Book Award, and the editor, along with his wife Debra Gwartney, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (Bookshop|Amazon). In the introduction to his...
A new online archive of Civil War letters offers a vivid portrait of the everyday lives of enlisted men. These soldiers lacked formal education so they wrote and spelled by ear. The letters show us how ordinary people spoke then. • Is there a single...
A flea market is a type of bazaar, usually outdoors, where vendors of secondhand and discount goods sell their wares. But why flea market? The term probably reflects the influence of two linguistic strains: In 18th-century New York City, the Fly...
The guy who may be the nation’s foremost garage sale expert called us from Crescent City, California, with a question that’s vital for anyone writing or thinking about garage sales: Do the verbs garage-saling or yard-saling refer to the...
Some new slang is making the rounds. Hamburger menus are those little stacks of short horizontal lines in the top left corner of websites that function as menus. Webrooming is the act of scoping out goods online only to buy them the store–the...