A new book about how animals perceive their environment reveals immense worlds beyond our own. A bee can see ultraviolet light, catfish have taste buds all over their bodies, and manatees use highly sensitive lips to examine nearby objects. Also...
Jennifer, a seventh-grade English teacher in Kingsport, Tennessee, and her students have been studying the development of Romance languages, which got them wondering: When did the words romance and romantic come to be associated with stories about...
The Latin word latibulum means a “refuge or hiding place of animals.” It derives from the same root that gives us the English word latent, meaning “hidden.” A 17th-century dictionary defines the now-rare English word...
The word radish derives from Latin radix, meaning “root.” The Latin word is at the root of the English words radical and eradicate. This is part of a complete episode.
If a suspect is at large, he is moving about freely. The term at large, which comes to us via French from Latin, refers not to size but to distance. The phrase by and large, meaning “generally” or “on the whole,” derives from...
Male baristas aren’t called baristos for the same reason that male Sandinistas aren’t Sandinistos. There’s a certain class of nouns in both Italian and Spanish where the definite article changes to indicate gender, but the noun...