15 Wonderful Words for Delightful Experiences
Some situations are just too perfect for words, but these bits of lovely lingo will shorten that list ever so slightly.
Some situations are just too perfect for words, but these bits of lovely lingo will shorten that list ever so slightly.
Is there any suffix more adorable than the lovely little –ling? It gives us yearlings and starlings, downy ducklings and goslings, affectionate darlings and siblings, and comforting tender dumplings. But –ling hasn’t always been so little and cute. It use
Light Warlpiri only has 350 native speakers, and none of them are older than 35 years old.
Until a few decades ago, Ukraine was almost always referred to as the Ukraine. Then people started dropping the definite article, and now you almost never see it. What gives?
Daven Hiskey runs the wildly popular interesting fact website Today I Found Out. To subscribe to his "Daily Knowledge" newsletter, click
The Terrifying Origin of "Drinking the Kool-Aid" and the massacre that gave us the phrase. In the wake of the tragedy, the phrase became a popular term for blind obedience, as the Temple members had apparently accepted cups of fruity poison willingly.
Wikimedia Commons"Happy as a clam" is one of those expressions that makes you wonder: Does this phrase come from an actual measurement of the happiness of
My dad always used to preface the dropping of an F-bomb or a tangent of creative profanity with a request that listeners “pardon his French.”
Around this time of year, we’re all loosening our belts and getting ready to gorge ourselves on hot, gravy-laden turkey. So we couldn’t help but wonder about things at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum: the “cold turkey” invoked when people up
Reader Jonathan wrote in to ask, “Why do we call other countries by names that they do not use themselves? Where did these names come from and why do we use them?"
The adjective "moot" means "open to debate." Yes, really. This is a dramatic difference from its common usage (at least in America), which basically means "not worth debating." A famous example comes from Rick Springfield's lyrics in "Jessie's Girl":
David J. Peterson is one of many conlangers: people who invent languages. His most recent work is the Dothraki tongue shown in HBO's "Game of Thrones"; the spoken language had to be invented for TV because it's rendered in English in the "Song of Ice an
The alphabet, as best as historians can tell, got its start in ancient Egypt sometime in the Middle Bronze Age, but not with the Egyptians. They were, at the time, writing with a set of hieroglyphs that were used both as representations of the consonants
We can't be 100 percent positive about the "actual" part.
Always a bridesmaid and never a bride, B is the also-ran, the second best, the afterthought, the sidekick to the alphaletter A. When things fall apart, we go to Plan B; we’ll watch B-movies with B-list actors on basic cable if we can’t fall asleep; we’ll
A hapax legomenon (often abbreviated just to hapax) is a word which appears only once -- in a language, a single written work, or the entire body of work of a given author. According to Wikipedia: "Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ???? ?????
Here at the _floss, we love Scrabble and have written about it often. Among others, there's Stacy's post on Scrabble words that will help you win, my post on how Alfred Mosher Butts, inventor of Scrabble, couldn't spell very well, and even a quiz by Jason
We're sifting through 6 years of print archives and give you a smattering of the best of the _floss. If you dig what you see, subscribe here. from lynching to chauvinism: 10 Awful Words and the People They're Named For by Mark Peters We all want to live
We've covered LOLCats before (including Miss C.'s hit LOLCat of Death post), but now things have gotten a little out of hand. The phenomenon of LOLCat Grammar has now matured enough to support a translation of the Bible into LOLCat language. Seriously.