“The latest comments, etc. are not showing up on the front page for me. I can see them if I click "past comments" but not if I refresh the front page.” more...
“Oh, I set privacy options, believe me. Everyone I work with, except two very select individuals whom I trust outside of work, is limited to seeing...” more...
“Being born with "mermaid syndrome," also known as sirenomelia, meant that the Kennebunkport girl had only one partially working kidney, no lower...” more...
“Another drummer joke: Major Reno rode up to Colonel Custer on the eve of the Little Bighorn massacre and said, "General, there's evidence of a large...” more...
It wasn't collected only by Confederates, though, nor was it only collected during the Civil War. (See "1776," the song where John and Abigail Adams...” more...
“This is my term (as far as I know, anyway) for the gigantic plastic bottle they give you to wiz in, when you have to do a 24-hour urine test at home.” more...
“But lots of people don't get married at all, whether they're parents or not. Maybe it's just the assumption that marriage and parenthood invariably...” more...
“... an old man entered the room, stooped over a black cane, moving with dignity. ... {I}t was made clear that he was the griot, or historan, of...” more...
“Beef, gold, and cloth traveled this way, and, when slaving began, people. Traffic passed through the Futa Jalon, a region of expert traders who...” more...
“The earliest house at Hyde Park burned down around the time of the American Revolution. A few years later, since none of the Balls wanted to live...” more...
“Okay, Wordizens! A colleague of mine needs images of wolf regurgitation. (Don't ask why.) He wasn't able to find a single image online. I'm willing...” more...
“Ball is quoting a nineteenth-century source (a country doctor), so undoubtedly it's a question of either a misspelling or a non-standard spelling of...” more...
“The captives—snatched from their families, some of them having witnessed the murder of their parents or children—were likely to have been in...” more...
“The unit of pricing was known as a bar, which was initially a measured piece of iron and later, after inflation, an imaginary unit. A length of...” more...
“'The currency the whites used to buy people fell into several categories, the most important of which was cloth, in the volume traded,' he said...” more...
“Whereas previously captives were kept tied in huts, Grant, Oswald & Co. had a fifteen-foot stone wall built around an area about 150 feet square, so...” more...
“The story of Bunce Island began in the seventeenth century, when English traders arrived at the Sierra Leone coast to buy ivory, as well as...” more...
“Since the end of Reconstruction, which followed the Civil War, all elected officials in South Carolina had been white, a situation partly secured...” more...
“... the decline of the rice barons began with Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Cotton had long been grown in South Carolina, but only on the islands...” more...
“'There's an expression to refer to children,' she said without smiling, 'who are called "step-asides." That means that the white father does not...” more...
“The Bakongo people live in a region near the old slave ports of Angola, from which tens of thousands came to South Carolina. Bakongo culture...” more...
“Intestinal worms were a common ailment, especially among the young, many of whom died from them. To one girl, McCormick gave '3 antihelmintic...” more...
“In February 1785, field hands Pompey and Binah evidently picked up some bacteria that opened sores and inflamed their skin. McCormick gave them each...” more...
“To choose a mate from inside the cousinhood seemed right, because a wedding within the clan kept intact estates and black villages that would...” more...
“The only sign of the former plantation was an allée of live oaks that marched in a line from the two-lane public road toward the site of the old...” more...
“At the trading depot {in Sierra Leone}, a short river emptied into the Atlantic where a peninsula thrust into the ocean. Along the coast and going a...” more...
“Is there a different word for the fatty folds of flesh on the underarms of overweight men? (Which, I might add, are usually more hairy and...” more...
“I had a bunch of words about commercial fishing, but I think they are subsumed into another list (Learned or Encountered in Reading, perhaps?)....” more...
