Author: Nola Jones

The particular annoyance of a clue that seems simple but isn’t is familiar to anyone who has spent a Sunday morning bent over a crossword grid, pencil hovering, coffee cooling. “Small monkey” is among them. Three phrases. Deceptively easy. Nevertheless, it has plagued puzzle solvers for years, primarily because the solution is solely dependent on the number of squares you must fill. For at least 20 years, and occasionally longer, the clue has appeared in popular American crosswords. It has been logged more than twenty times by Crossword Tracker, one of those unobtrusive online resources that puzzle enthusiasts rely on.…

A recent chapter by Kate Bailey of the Cambridge Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring contains a minor, nearly unremarkable fact that should worry more people than it does. According to her, a child’s progress during their first year of school doesn’t diminish. They remain. Exams and the long, awkward years of adolescence continue to leave their mark until the age of sixteen. It’s the kind of conclusion that sounds almost too neat, but the evidence supporting it is stubborn and has been accumulating for decades. Bailey’s work in The First Year at School: An International Perspective is intriguing for reasons…

Observing a crossword clue resist you can be enjoyable. You glance away after reading it once or twice. Six letters: “Rich, naturally fermented soy sauce.” The pencil lingers. This small obstacle will seem familiar to anyone who has spent a peaceful afternoon leafing through the back pages of a newspaper. It appears to be fairly straightforward, almost generous in its description. However, the solution doesn’t always appear right away. Most of the time, TAMARI is the word the puzzle seeks. The most dependable solution for that exact phrase, according to the majority of solving databases, is six letters that naturally…

These days, the word appears in strange places. a TikTok response. A casual remark in a group chat. When choosing a restaurant, someone shrugs and types “brow.” No follow-up, no punctuation. A little flat, a little final, it sits there. If you’re over thirty, you most likely read it twice and thought your friend was referring to their eyebrows. It’s not unusual to be confused. The dictionary still defines “brow” as the forehead, the ridge above the eye, or occasionally the steep edge of a hill for the majority of recorded English. Collins enumerates six different versions. Merriam-Webster keeps everything…

The word “tinsel” has a subtle allure. The word itself has a nearly six-century history, but most people only give it a thought once a year, usually while untangling a knotted strand from last December’s box. Its Old French origin, estincele, which means sparkle, still seems appropriate. Fundamentally, the word “tinsel” refers to eye-catching light. These days, the term “tinsel” mostly describes those long, glossy strips that are draped over mantelpieces or wrapped around Christmas trees. It is described in dictionaries as thin, glittering strands of material, typically made of plastic or metal, that mimic the appearance of ice or…

When you first see one, you don’t really recognize it as a monkey. It resembles a tiny ginger cat that chose to stay after wandering too far up a tree. The telltale mane, a thick orange ruff that frames a small black face, is the reason why naturalists continued to draw parallels with cats centuries ago. They were once described by Antonio Pigafetta, who was sailing with Magellan, as lovely little cats that resembled tiny lions. In spirit, if not in taxonomy, the description remained relevant. The lion-maned monkey is a family of four animals that live in the diminishing…

For many years, the discussion surrounding early childhood education in Nigeria sounded like it does in most places with limited resources and conflicting priorities. The language of childhood, nurturing, and moral obligation surrounded it. Everyone agreed that it was necessary, but for some reason, roads, electricity, security, and oil always came in second. Before deciding to completely alter the course of events, the OMEP Nigeria chapter observed this for a considerable amount of time. The cause was not what changed. The vocabulary was the problem. At some point, the advocates of the chapter began using the language of economists instead…

The problem with awards in the early years sector is that, historically, very few people outside the sector have ever heard of them. A brief ceremony, a few well-dressed teachers, courteous applause, and a printed certificate that would eventually be displayed above a coffee maker in a staff room in Drogheda or Limerick. For years, that was the beat. Silent, kind, and mostly undetectable. The ripple hasn’t really stopped since OMEP Ireland took a slightly different action. It started, as these initiatives frequently do, with a single national award honoring an early childhood educator whose work had, by all accounts,…

A tiny word crept into regular texting and would not go away, somewhere between the emergence of group chats and the gradual demise of the unread email. Pin. Four characters. Hardly worth looking at again. However, if you look through practically any phone in a coffee shop these days, you’ll see that little tack icon hovering at the top of someone’s messages, holding a Venmo reminder, a forgotten address, or a friend’s half-serious threat that just says, “don’t be late again.” It’s the type of word that can have multiple meanings depending on the speaker. A teen who instructs her…

You think you’ve misheard the statistic the first time you hear it. Preschoolers, who are three or four years old and occasionally just past potty training, are suspended and expelled at a rate that is about three times higher than that of students in K–12 institutions. Some people are still learning how to grasp a crayon. A director is signing documents somewhere, requesting that they not return. It’s an odd picture to look at. Suspension has always been associated with older children—those who talk back or skip class. However, the data has been telling a different story for some time.…