Did you know that redheaded people only make up 1-2% of the world's population? There's a reason we are so scarce: the sun. I'm that person who can get a sunburn on a cloudy day. People have been known to get secondhand sunburns by just standing near me outside on a sunny day. I'm so white I get a moonburn.
Sometimes you can have too many of one thing — like presidential primary candidates, for instance. You can have too many toothpaste options at the grocery store. You can also have too many pillows on your bed. Organization expert Marie Kondo is a household name because of her minimalistic outlook. However, you don’t want to get rid of all of your pillows — right? You need at least one.
Do you want to work your way from the mailroom to the corner office? I can tell you’ve got gumption, kid, so leave it to me. I’ll give you some swell advice that’ll have you drinking gold-leafed martinis quicker than you can say “Scrooge McDuck doing the backstroke in a roomful of golden coins.”
You may want to sit down for this.
There’s a supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park called the Yellowstone Caldera that last erupted in a big way approximately 640,000 years ago. The next time erupts, it could potentially result in a large swath of North America getting covered in ash, creating a sustained volcanic winter that kills roughly half the world’s population.
John Lennon famously got in trouble in August 1966 when an interview from March of the same year dug up a single quote where he stated that The Beatles were (at the time) “more popular than Jesus.” Although this quote from a March interview was out of context, it led to many former fans burning Beatle records in big, radio station-backed bonfires.
As a student of words and grammar, sometimes I let a word roll around in my head like a sommelier swishes wine in his mouth. For the record — swishing is the technical term for what wine aficionados do so that wine triggers all different types of tastebuds inside the mouth. Lately, I’ve heard the term “winnow” quite a bit.
Can something sound wrong, but actually be right? Take, for instance, French fries dipped in a Wendy’s Frosty. This combination shouldn’t be good, but it’s actually a dollar menu match made in heaven.
I don’t attend many movies with groups anymore. Part of that is a life stage issue—most of my friends are married and have small kids. It’s hard to justify the added babysitter expense if we want to go out for the evening. Before that, I was always the guy who arrived early. Because of my promptness, I ended up saving seats for the whole group.
The following is a scenario based on real events. Any names have been changed to avoid embarrassment and grammar-shaming.
My friend, Ann, drives a van. Ann drives a tan van, and she’s married to Stan, but this story isn’t about him. It’s about Ann and her tan van.
Here’s our family setup: Carrie and I have been married nearly twelve years. We adopted our son, Miles, from Ghana in 2015 (he’s five-and-a-half now). Our daughter, Maeve (biological), just turned two.
Cliff from Wilmington points out how I wrote recently that I was “raised in Oklahoma.” First of all, thanks for not making some sort of joke about how Okies don’t know anything about grammar. After all, it’s a statewide mandate that all Oklahomans love our papaws and grammers (especially her synonym rolls).
Curtis Honeycutt, writer of the weekly humor column “Grammar Guy,” will receive a $2,000 grant through the Indiana Arts Commission’s Individual Advancement Program. The grant, funded by the State of Indiana in conjunction with the federally appropriated funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, will allow Honeycutt to pursue some writing projects as well as a literary-focused event in 2020.
There is most certainly an unspoken bond between redheads. We haven’t quite developed ESP in order to communicate with each other, but we do have a team of scientists working on it in a secret laboratory nestled in the Scottish Highlands. Redheads do, however, have one way to immediately identify and empathize with each other: the nod.
I’ve lived in Indiana for twelve years now, and, prior to that, I was born and raised in Oklahoma. In both places, I couldn’t help but notice the same strange phenomenon when people talked about shopping at grocery stores. For some reason, people tend to add an “s” to the end of the name of the store.
Americans like being the best at things. We’re the best at baseball, jazz, freedom, national parks—pretty much anything Ken Burns has already covered. Yes, living in the Land of Opportunity is glorious. Today, I’d like to award us (and, by us, I mean U.S.) a super-sized gold medal for smashing words together more efficiently than anyone else in the world.
According to G.K. Chesterton, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.” First of all, I have to tip my cap to Chesterton’s excellent use of the subjunctive case when he uses “were” in the second sentence.
I love this time of year for many reasons, but perhaps my favorite thing about early summer is the farmers market. I make sure to stock up on kettle corn, sweet corn, cornhole bags, candy corn, and top off my peppercorn grinder. What can I say? In Indiana, we love our corn.
I ran into my friend Lou at the farmers market on Saturday, and she looked troubled. This wasn’t because the sweet corn wasn’t in season yet, but because it’s graduation season, and she had a very good reason to be bothered.
I have some urgent news: there’s an epidemic sweeping the country. So far, scientists haven’t found a cure, but I’m happy to report that it’s preventable. It leaves people looking foolish in front of other people they’re trying to impress at parties and can, in rare cases, cause a breakup of a romantic relationship. I’m talking about RAS Syndrome.
