The busiest time of year for the US Postal Service coincides with the December holiday season, when we’re all busy mailing greetings and gifts alike. But USPS workers are busy year-round: postal employees process a whopping 181.9 million of pieces of first-class mail per day! The 470,000 employees who work for the USPS (including the 7,000 on the Fleet of Feet delivering mail on foot) rely …
How can a person cause the death of another without the act being considered a murder? In US law, it can come down to differences between manslaughter and murder—which comes down to differences in intent and degree. What does manslaughter mean? Manslaughter, simply defined, is “the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought.” US law designates two types of manslaughter: voluntary and involuntary. …
Just like people assume family members are inherently similar because they are related, people assume the same things about words: if they have similar spellings and soundings, they must be alike. As it is with people, the similarities between some related words that look and sound the same end there. Take ambiguous and ambivalent for example. They share the Latin prefix ambi-, which means “both,” …
Every March and November, most Americans change their clocks to keep up with the switch into or out of daylight-saving time. This practice of advancing the clocks ahead an hour is called daylight-saving time. But, because daylight savings time is used so frequently, the term is also considered acceptable. Daylight-saving time means that since the clock is moved ahead one hour, you get one more …
These names used to be roughly interchangeable when distinguishing the social outcasts from the in-crowd in school. Yet, those so-called social rejects were destined to rule the world in the form of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, et al. “The geek shall inherit the earth,” indeed. Oh yeah, and billions of dollars. There’s a lot of overlap in the meanings of nerd, geek, and …
Three verbs that mean similar things: charge, convict, and sentence. They appear in the news constantly, but do you know what each term actually describes? What does it mean to be charged with a crime? Let’s begin with charge. When a person is charged with a crime, a formal allegation (a statement not yet proven) of an offense is made. We typically refer to charges in the …
March 14 marks one of the geekiest days on the calendar. But, some people might confuse it for one of the tastiest. It’s Pi Day. Not pie, but pi (II, π), the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet. In mathematics, the character is used to represent a constant—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter—which is approximately 3.14159+. While the infinitely long …
Some of us get squeamish at the sight of them. Some of us shoot studs into them. And, no two are exactly alike, even for identical twins. We’re here to talk about belly buttons, folks. What actually is a belly button? The belly button is an informal term for the navel. It refers to the scar on the abdomen that is caused when the umbilical …
To most, the word noon signifies a specific time of day–namely, 12:00 midday (aka “lunchtime”). But, surprisingly, the term noon wasn’t always shorthand for midday at 12:00; in fact, it used to refer to a different time of day altogether. First, some history. Clocks and watches are relatively new inventions. Though some timekeeping devices, like sundials and water clocks, have been used for thousands of years, …
by Nicole Holliday When I was a kid, I always just assumed that everyone in the world called people like me “mixed,” because in the 1990s in central Ohio, where I grew up, mixed almost always referred to folks like me, who had one black parent and one white parent. The community I grew up in had very few people who identified as anything other …
The word ban gets bandied about a lot these days, from vegan brides wanting to ban meat-eaters from their weddings to plastic straws getting banned from coffee drinks. On an individual level, banning things we don’t like or agree with can be an easy way to rid them from our life. But, zoom out to a governmental and societal level, and bans become much more complex. What …
