Welcome back, all — and, fittingly for our final essay in this series, let’s talk about the language of not giving up. English has a whole gritty little vocabulary for it: “grit”, “guts”, “backbone”, “stickability”. Notice how bodily they are again — willpower is imagined as something physical, something in […]

Welcome back, everyone! Here’s a curious thing about how we talk about speed and power: our language runs out of literal words almost immediately and starts borrowing. A sprinter doesn’t just start quickly — she “explodes” out of the blocks. A runner doesn’t simply move fast — he “flies”. We […]

Welcome back, all! English has a wonderful paradox tucked inside it: the phrase “a deafening silence”. Silence is the absence of sound, and yet we describe it as if it could be loud enough to hurt. That’s because we never really experience silence on its own — we only notice […]