In the opening paragraph of "Crime and Punishment", two locations are mentioned only by first and final letter; the rest of the words are replaced with underlines. My translation has a footnote that said Dostoevsky refrained from using the actual names because of censorship. What sort of censor...

I've encountered the following phrase in a Geeves and Wooster book: He had been beaming like a searchlight until I mentioned this aspect of the matter, and the radiance suddenly disappeared as if it had been switched off at the main. I'm trying to guess the meaning of the phrase "at the main" h...

There's a little poem that goes something like this: "Here lies the body of Thomas Grey, Who died defending his right of way. He was perfectly right as he sped along, But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong". Looking up this poem reveals many versions, with any number of variations on the nam...

Last year (2020) saw some changes to the question closure system across the SE network. One of the changes was to introduce audience-specific texts for custom close reasons, so that the OP, close voters, privileged users, and the general public can all get slightly different versions of the same ...

The following quote is frequently attributed by the internet to the famous 15th-16th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci: Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. It's well known...

Sign language literature There is a thriving community of folks who produce literature in sign language. Some of the same elements of "regular" literature are present, such as repetition, symbolism, a kind of "rhyme" for poetry, etc. However the fact that humans are performing the literature, wit...