PHONY, kitch and camp are examples of a useful phenomenon: every so often a word breezes into common usage meaning many things and weaving together previously unrelated objects into a new category.

The Russian language has notions that do not have direct equivalents in other cultures, so the words that denote them often do have an accurate translation into other languages. One of these words is ...

Boston–The Russians have a useful, if untranslatable, term, poshlost. It means something like “self-aggrandizing banality.” In his book on Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov describes poshlost as “the falsely ...

A story about a science experiment that involves a naked female diver: Braving sub-zero temperatures, she has thrown caution — and her clothes — to the wind to tame two beluga whales in a unique and ...