Who doesn’t like a riddle, right??  Riddles stretch our brain muscles and make us think in “outside-the-box” kind of ways.  One of many children’s favorite kinds of riddles are the ones that lead to rhyming pairs of words.  Often called “Hink Pink” (one syllable) or “Hinky Pinky” (two syllables), or “Hinkety Pinkety” (three syllables) these [...]

Americans love their slang. It is unusual to get through even one normal conversation without at least one idiom or slang phrase coming up.  Idioms, or slang expressions, are words or phrases that you cannot figure out from the actual word choice. They often mean something completely different from the normal use of the words, [...]

If I overhear a part of a conversation at the next table in a restaurant where a woman says she pushed her brother off the bridge, I am likely to want to call the authorities.  But if I had heard the part of the conversation before that, I would know that she and her husband [...]

My dad was an English teacher and was obsessed by words.  It wasn’t unusual for us to be walking along a sidewalk or down a store aisle when he would suddenly turn to me and ask me if I knew the root word of the word “obligingly.”  Not knowing that this was unusual in the [...]