My parents and my wife’s parents have a good relationship. It’s nice. It’s rare. And they use a word to describe each other: machatunim. We hear it a lot. My wife’s dad, at home: “I spoke to the ...

English is a quirky, often confusing language that's been shaped and influenced by many others. As such, it has a massive variety of words—but here are some we think rise above the crowd and deserve ...

Figuring out how many words there are in the English language is complicated for a number of reasons. Let’s start with its roots. What about persona non grata, “an unacceptable or unwanted person,” ...

Other languages have words that mean false, tacky, or trying too hard, but only the English slang term “cheesy” can fully express something so fake that it stinks like Camembert: “He came up to me at ...

The Anglo Saxons didn’t say ‘the’, they said ‘sê’ – as in pass me ‘sê’ bread. Nowhere in Old English grammar is there actually a precise ancestor for ‘the’. But some time over the 1100s it entered our ...

An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link The English language is, indeed, a quirky one: it's notoriously difficult to learn, and often words have more than one meaning. Some of these ...