Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap...
Advice about college essays from the winner of a top prize for children’s literature: Kelly Barnhill encourages teens to write about experiences that are uniquely their own, from a point of view that is theirs and no one else’s. Plus...
Our conversation about words that are simply fun to say (such as oligopoly, or “domination of a market by just a few producers”) reminded a listener in Jackson, Tennessee, of a scene from a 1955 movie The Glass Slipper. A woman says she...
After our conversation about Off we go like a herd of turtles, often said by a parent gathering kids to leave the house, Joanna in Santa Cruz, California, shares the one she heard from her father: Here we go, laughing and scratching! In 1939...
The documentary The Palindromists includes a scene with author, actor, and devoted palindrome constructor Danica McKellar showing off her favorite reversible creation: Tons of UFO snot. This is part of a complete episode.
The phrase Lead on, Macduff, meaning “Let’s go!” or “You go on ahead and I’ll follow,” is an alteration of the famous phrase from the final scene of combat in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Bookshop|Amazon), where...