In a word: While opening his last tin (can) of beans for supper, he heard his infant daughter crying in her cot (crib). After sticking a dummy (pacifier) in her mouth to quiet her, Claus discovered that her nappy (diaper) was in dire need of changing.

The 1960s started off with an interrobang, a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, which was the brainchild of advertising executive Martin K. Speckter.

In a Word: Different yet the same, they all play off reality — for laughs, revelation or pain.

In a Word: It wasn’t that long ago that I was suffering through the swullocking (hot, humid) dog days of summer (the period of July 3 through Aug. 11, so named for the dog star Sirius), hoping for some relief.

How do words get into dictionaries? A few months ago I wrote a column about long words. In it I noted that the longest word to be recognized by the good people at Merriam-Webster was considerably shorter than some of the long words recognized by their competitors. So why is that? “Famously,” they say, “the […]

In a Word: Proving that word geeks know no limits, there’s the Russian nesting doll of kangaroo words: the grand kangaroo word.

Attaching a face to a product is a successful marketing technique, whether the face is that of Cap’n Horatio Magellan Crunch, Uncle Ben or Mia the Land O’Lakes ‘Butter Maiden.’

Why, one guy online even wrote: “When my neighbor says, ‘my husband’s and I’s,’ I want to hit her in the mouth.” Easy now, they’re just words.

In a Word: Lewiston word expert Jim Witherell has also always wondered about the time someone telephoned quotable baseball great Yogi Berra at 2 a.m.