All the answers to this puzzle from Quiz Guy John Chaneski are two-word phrases, and the only vowel they contain is the letter A. For example, suppose John is lounging in a shaded spot where only one variety of fruit is allowed. Where is he? This is...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski is dreaming up new plots for movies by changing one letter in an existing movie title. For example, if you change one vowel, what hilarious classic comedy becomes the tale of a rebellious, spiky-haired animal found in mosh...
Jerrell in San Antonio, Texas, is curious about the term helter-skelter, meaning “haphazardly.” English is full of such reduplicatives, also called rhyming jingles, flip-flop words, or echo words. They fall into three categories: one...
Sean in Asheville, North Carolina, wonders how to pronounce the nearby town of Leicester. Say it the way the locals do. It’s part of a family of British place names affected by vowel reduction and haplology, the omission of a sound or syllable...
The novels Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright and A Void by Georges Perec are examples of constrained writing or lipograms. Lipogrammatic writing is composed entirely with words that don’t contain a particular letter, such as, in this case, the...
Joe in Huntsville, Alabama, says an elderly friend consistently says hope to mean help. For more than a century, some speakers in parts of the Southern United States to drop the L sound before another consonant in words, which then affects the...
