When I go out to the theatre there are often people dressed up smartly for the event. Sponsor: Hold your meetings online for just $49 a month Try GoToMeeting free. We mill about sipping wine until the doors are thrown open and a slightly upper-crust v

I havenrsquo;t pulled any definitions from Urbandictionary for a while, but what they have to say about the word weird is so normal as to fit into a conventional style of dictionary. Sponsor: Hold your meetings online for just $49 a month Try GoToMeeti

I am thinking of one of Gary Larsonrsquo;s cartoons; The Far Side. Two monsters are lying under the bed, one says to the other ldquo;I keep getting this creepy feeling there is something up there.rdquo; Sponsor: Hold your meetings online for just $49 a m

The word sublime does not derive from being under a green piece of citrus fruit, but it may derive from being under something else. Sponsor: Hold your meetings online for just $49 a month Try GoToMeeting free. Good food and wine are sometimes called subl

(a rerun from 2006) Yesterday I talked of nautical miles and knots.nbsp; The nautical mile is so named because it is near enough in length to a mile that people could get their heads around how far it represented. The mile that is represented in roadsid

(a rerun from 2006) A while back, when I did the episode on ldquo;log-inrdquo; I got a message from Wally who said that as a pilot he was extremely interested in my passing reference to the fact that a shiprsquo;s speed is referred to in knots, because t

Today there are a wide variety of pajama styles that people can choose from.nbsp; But it has not always been so. The word pajama came into English two hundred years ago and before that time it was pretty well universal for English speaking people to go t

A draft beer is beer on tap, as opposed to beer from a can or bottle.nbsp; The reason it is called draft beer is that the word draft draft is really only the modern spelling of an older word draught with the same pronunciation.nbsp; Both these words mean

I worked at a place a few years ago where one of the principals was a mathematician.nbsp; There seemed to be a lot of joking about whether doing math was part of peoplersquo;s job descriptionsmdash;apparently quite a few people were intimidated by it. If

Sometimes my teenagersrsquo; reactions are what I would call melodramatic. I heard someone explain once that adolescents hadnrsquo;t yet learned a sense of proportion.nbsp; Ask them the question, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is breaking your nail and 1