Assuming that the future history of humanity is not accurately depicted in Idiocracy, it's possible that large numbers of humans will eventually settle the solar system. These human communities will be isolated from each...

The roots of the words we use for numbers vary around the world, but they often originated in terms that correspond to our body parts. That shouldn't be surprising, since our base ten (decimal) counting system stems from...

"Dagnabbit" is a hilarious word that you probably...  ...meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in...

Slang terms come and go, and if you keep using them, they will reveal your age. Things that are good can be the bee's knees, groovy, rad, or awesome, depending on the decade you're in. But good things can be cool, too, n...

Languages are different, and use sounds that are different from each other. But people who learn a new language often retain an accent from their original language. How does that happen? Folks tend to retain bits and pie...

On a Dallas-bound flight in1979, Roger Shuy, a pro...  ...s-bound flight in1979, Roger Shuy, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, struck up a conversatio...  ...But it wasn’t until the 1980s that forensic linguistics came into its own as a profession. Before that, l...  ...nguage- but in th...

The Canadian linguistic quirk of putting "eh" at the end of a sentence is an example of a tag, which is a word or phrase appended to a sentence. In Mandarin, any statement appended with "ma" turns that statement into a q...

(Photo: Robert Bejil)What gets your heart pumping and your head banging? It's definitely not lyrics that include words such as "committee" and "approximately."Iain, a data scientist, blogs at Degenerate State. He conduct...

(Photo: QFamily)The origin of the doughnut is shrouded in mystery, but it probably began in mid-Nineteenth Century America when a woman named Elizabeth Gregory made pastries, each of which had a single nut in the center....

*alarm goes off*Ugh, this again. *remembers breakfast is a thing*Well, alright then.— Chris Hallbeck (@ChrisHallbeck) April 21, 2016 Lots of things are things now. For example, micro braids for hair are now a thin...