…a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terra-cotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread.What's this? I asked.It's bread, she replied.But it's in a...
Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha’penny to one shilling four nibblings or whate...
The Pacific is about a foot and a half higher along its western edge—a consequence of the centrifugal force created by the Earth’s spin. Just as when you pull on a tub of water the water tends to flow...
Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never...
At the far end, a shop called the Boscombe Antique Market had a big sign in the window that said ‘We Buy Anything!’, which seemed an unusually generous offer, so I went inside, gobbed on the counter a...
Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf.
Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin t...
Mispronouncing buoy. The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a boo-ee. It’s a boy. Think about it. Would you call something that floats boo-ee-ant? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Br...
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astoundi...
He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A...
The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course,...
[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of...
A modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical...
Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.
Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help—perhaps a good deal of help.
We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known...
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As...
For you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has...
Bayes’s theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes’s theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions—or inverse probabilities, as they are someti...
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