What Are Smithereens?
“Blown to smithereens” is such a great, colorful phrase. Almost everyone knows exactly what you mean, without being able to define what exactly a smithereen is. What the heck are they?
“Blown to smithereens” is such a great, colorful phrase. Almost everyone knows exactly what you mean, without being able to define what exactly a smithereen is. What the heck are they?
Street art has gone mainstream. Just about every city in the world—as well as suburbs and deserts—has stickers, murals, and wheatpastes to admire. But what if it’s all graffiti to you?
English spelling is hard. It's hard for kids to learn it, and it's hard for adults who have already learned it to remember how to do it right. It would be nice to have some consistent, general rules to go by, but alas, there are few. Maybe none. Even the
By adding shm- to words, you can be simultaneously grumpy and cute. But there are some words that cause confusion about how the shm- should best be attached.
In his angry dissent to the court's decision on the Defense of Marriage Act on Wednesday, Justice Scalia conveyed a specific kind of derision through his use of several colloquial expressions. The most noticeable of these expressions was "argle bargle," w
Having served as a camera operator on over 100 films, Dave Knox knows a thing or two about the wacky slang used by movie industry insiders. Here are a few.
Think poets are just stodgy writers who sit at their desks penning boring poems? Think again. Here are eleven poets who sometimes showed their more bawdy side.
Careful where you put that hyphen—here are eight rules from the AP Stylebook that you might never know unless you looked them up.
Maybe you can help! Here are six appeals from the OED.
The list of new additions reliably provokes indignant complaints about the decline of standards and ruination of the language, but detractors need not worry. The list actually shows how French remains robust, alive, and in step with the times.
Simple English Wikipedia was launched in 2003 as a resource for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties and people who are trying to learn English." In some if its reformulations, especially of already s
The names of several familiar foods come to us from Nahautl, the language of the Aztecs. But cuisine is not the only source of English words with an Aztec background.
Chinese characters are made up of strokes. Learning to write them involves not only learning where all the strokes go, but also the order in which they are supposed to be written and the direction of each individual stroke (left to right, up to down, etc.
For as long as people have been speaking the English language, they’ve been deploying it to poke fun at one another.
What do you call a word that spells another word backwards or a word that looks the same upside down? When terms for these orthographic puzzlers didn’t exist, logolologists were happy to invent some. Here are a few.
The symbols we use also have names: dollar sign, treble clef, asterisk, etc. But sometimes the name for a symbol takes on a different sort of meaning.
Nothing is certain but death, taxes, and spam comments on your blog. One way to avoid repeating the same comment over and over without having to write thousands of different original comments is to replace the words in one comment with various synonyms.
Words we use every day in modern English owe their inclusion in dictionaries to a British army officer picking up a few slang words from the cotton traders in Bangalore, street food vendors in the Caribbean, or the Boer warriors two fought against Britons
Named after the great Roman emperor, Julius Caesar, yet he was not the first baby born by the procedure.
Rules of language games in other languages may vary, but here are some general guidelines for fun in 11 different languages.
Even if you’ve never had your own brush with the law, you no doubt know the Miranda warning. But who was it named after?
Even the Oxford English Dictionary admits they have no evidence of the actual origin.
Here are some uncommon but etymologically sound plurals that you may employ for petty pedantry at your own risk. You are better off using them in the fun way, though they are most likely to be received as confusing.