Americans abroad are frequently surprised to discover that tipping is actually optional elsewhere, and visitors to the United States are frequently baffled by how much is expected and how non-negotiable…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Consider what the front lawn actually is, described without the familiarity. A household takes the most prominent portion of its property, plants a non-native grass on it, prevents…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are very few pieces of American folk knowledge as wrong as this one. Ask why the clocks change and you will be told it is for the…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Anybody over a certain age in the United States had this exchange hundreds of times without ever once finding it strange. You walked in, somebody picked up a…
Almost all of them are descriptions, not decorations. Here are seventeen.
1. A Trade Name Means the Trade Was There
Streets named for tanners, bakers, coopers, dyers, weavers or smiths…
There is a question that sounds naive and turns out to open a real research problem: does everybody divide colours up the same way?
The physical answer is that the…