Why is everyone suddenly tweeting about OK boomer? What is that Baby Yoda meme all up in our feeds about? And who are Becky and Karen, anyways? Oh, we’ve got this. We love keeping up with the latest terms in slang and getting to the bottom of the funniest, strangest, and, yes, thorniest trends in pop culture and social media. We love it so much, …
What’s in a name? A lot, apparently! It’s no secret that writers agonize over what to name their characters. It’s for good reason: a name can make or break how audiences remember a character. It has the potential to be truly iconic. Many authors can’t even begin to write until they’ve given each and every person in their book a name. So how does one …
Anyone who has spent nights during their childhood huddled under a comforter with a flashlight (or more recently a flashlight app) lighting up the splayed pages of a book knows that being a bookworm helps you build the sort of vocabulary that earns you eyerolls on the playground and accolades from the teachers. Yet, dedicated bibliophiles know there’s really only one problem that comes with …
He may have been 🎶dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor🎶 … but by now we all know Alexander Hamilton grew up to be a hero and a scholar. However, did you know the first secretary of the treasury was also quite the linguist? Since Lin-Manuel Miranda turned Hamilton from a mysterious face on our $10 bill …
On Independence Day (July 4th), we ooh and ahh at the fireworks bursting in air, but did you know that the different types of fireworks effects have their own names? What’s a peony firework? The peony is one of the most common kinds of aerial pyrotechnic effects. It is named for a variety of plants with large, showy flowers. This firework display has a flower-like explosion …
It’s hard to believe, but this month marks 20 years of daily lexical morsels from Word of the Day. What started as a small audience of intrepid logophiles, who braved spotty dial-up connections for their quotidian word fix in 1999, has blossomed into a vibrant community of Word of the Day devotees, who bring context, conversation, inspiration, and personal connections to our selections every day. …
Words are funny things. For one thing, they are always changing. Consider lit, which, conventionally, refers to “lighting something up, e.g., a lit candle.” But, in slang, lit means something is “excellent.” It’s hot, it’s on fire—which are just more examples of how we play with words. For another, they keep secret stories of the past. Did you know daisy literally means “day’s eye,” named for the way …
It didn’t take very long for the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye to sneak into America’s chests and start tugging those heartstrings. Now, with Season 4 out on July 19, 2019, we wanted to shine the spotlight on some of the lexical magic of the Fab Five.Spoiler alert … some Queer Eye plot points may be revealed. Grab your tissues and prepare for the ride.For …
From its star-studded studios to its star-lined Walk of Fame, Los Angeles is a city that shines bright, literally and figuratively. There are few things that can’t be found within its sprawling, sunny city limits—it just might take a while to get there, depending on traffic. Even if you’ve never visited, its influence is still apparent. Los Angeles’s films scream from our screens and its celebrities plaster …
If you’ve ever watched a mobster movie set in New York—and let’s face it, most of them are—you probably think that talking like a New Yorker is as easy as dropping a few Rs and smushing whole sentences into one word. The dialect particular to movie depictions of New York City’s Italian-American community is one of the best recognized in the country, but it doesn’t …
Perhaps you’ve scrolled through social media and seen someone comment: Classic self-own. Greatest self-own of the year so far. Olympics-level self-own. Hall-of-fame self-own. This is both a self-own and a universal truth https://t.co/xbHhqovnnL — John Haltiwanger (@jchaltiwanger) January 30, 2020 What are these self-owns, and why are they epic? To understand what self-own really means, we must first know the meaning of the slang term …
Chi Town, The Big Onion, The Windy City. Call it what you will, Chicago is home to a herd of sports teams that could fill a zoo—the Cubs, the Bears, and the Bulls (and, oh yeah, the White Sox too). Not to mention it’s the land of deep-dish pizza and Chicago-style hot dogs. It’s a fantastic city filled with museums, shopping, and industry. This midwestern …
