Duty Comes Before Pleasure, But Only in the Dictionary

Harold L. Spence? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: You examined an adage about success and work that cleverly referred to their alphabetical order. I’ve seen a different joke about duty and pleasure: Duty comes before pleasure, but only in the dictionary. Would you please explore this saying? Quote Investigator: The earliest instance of this type of …

YOLO in the Boston Globe

Top language columnist Ben Zimmer has written a great article for the Boston Globe about YOLO. He referenced QI (a.k.a. Garson O’Toole) and some of the research that was posted on this website. Zimmer is the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com. He also writes for the New York Times. Newspapers are shrinking, and the …