Far from being a sign of poor education, Appalachian English is a complex, rule-governed dialect rooted in Elizabethan history and…
Paralipsis is the ancient rhetorical art of emphasizing a subject by significantly pretending to pass over it—exemplified by phrases like,…
Named after the character Mrs. Malaprop from a 1775 play, malapropisms are linguistic errors where a speaker substitutes a correct-sounding…
What happens when a word appears only once in the entire written history of a language? These unique occurrences, known…
Why do we say "feet" instead of "foots"? It isn't a random quirk of English grammar, but the result of…
While most European languages form questions by simply swapping the subject and verb (like the German "Trinken Sie?"), English requires…
Why does the most common word in a language appear exactly twice as often as the second most common one?…
Travel back to the 16th-century Vijayanagara Empire to discover why Emperor Krishnadevaraya famously declared Telugu the "greatest of the nation's…
Ever wondered why we say "Ye Olde" to sound medieval? It turns out we've been reading it wrong for centuries.…
Have you ever wondered why candy is sometimes called a "sweetmeat", or why we "starve" from hunger but the word's…
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