By Joseph W. Smith III Though we took a hiatus to write about movies and music, Webb’s most recent “Weird Words” column ended with a term that helped young Shrey Parikh win the 98th Scripps National Spelling Bee this year. That was uayeb — pronounced “WYE-eb.” Merriam-Webster defines this as “a period consisting of five
Steven Spielberg stands among cinema’s greatest directors, having given us some of the most entertaining movies ever made. Unfortunately, Disclosure Day isn’t one of them. Released to a strong box-office on June 11, the director’s latest doesn’t even rise to the level of his recent good-not-great offerings (Bridge of Spies, Ready Player One, Catch Me
As Williamsport’s world-famous Repasz Band highlights both national and local history through the summer of 2026, one Central PA ensemble will get special attention on July 5. The Williamsport Scottish Rite Imperial Teteques Band, once the nation’s oldest Masonic band, will be honored with a free 7 p.m. concert that Sunday — performed where the
It’s confession time for your favorite word-nerd: Last week, “Weird Words” contained a spelling error — all the worse because it wasn’t a casual typo in the text, but rather one of the actual terms on that list: the Nahuatl tlatchli, which I spelled wrong by transposing the “t” and “ch” (tlachtli). This gaffe won’t
The 98th Scripps National Spelling Bee finished up on May 28 in Washington, D.C. Its winning word was bromocriptine, correctly spelled by 14-year-old Shrey Parikh, of Rancho Cucamonga, CA. According to the USA Today piece on that meet, this year’s winning word means “a polypeptide alkaloid that is a derivative of ergot and mimics the
