Anna in Bellingham, Washington, is puzzled by her younger roommates' use of the expression bet to "sure," "okay," "yes," "cool." This slang has been around for at least 30 years and is sometimes expanded to bet bet or even bet bet bet.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle has a visual element. For example, what's the answer if the clues are "Part of a football game" and the letters T I, followed by two blank spaces?

Terry, a native of Akron, Ohio, is curious why it seems no one outside of his hometown uses the term devil strip to mean "the narrow band of grass between sidewalk and street." Devil strip was formerly used this way in a few other cities, but is now heard almost exclusively in Akron, Ohio. This dialectal difference figures in one of the greatest of all stories involving forensic linguistics.

In a previous episode, five-year-old Quinn asked why the letter Q is so often followed by the letter U. A new children's book seems to have been written just for her. Q and U Call It Quits is a funny story about the chaos that ensues for the rest of the alphabet when those two letters quarrel. It's written by Stef Wade and illustrated by Jorge Martin. (Bookshop|Amazon)

Bhavika in San Diego, California, was intrigued to hear an English speaker use the phrase too clever by half meaning "a little too smart for one's own good" or "more clever than prudent." There's a similar phrase in her native Gujarati that translates as "one and a half times clever."

Logan in Wilmington, North Carolina, says he and his friends have long used scooter-pooting to mean "going around having a good time." Both scooter-pooting and scooter-tooting are colloquial terms for casual socializing, and are widespread, although heard primarily in the Southern United States.

In the 19th century, books were especially popular gifts -- cheap enough to be owned by the middle class, but enough of an investment that people kept them for decades, then passed them down to the next generation or donated them to libraries. Increasingly, libraries must decide which of these books to clear out and digitize to make room for more. In the process, they risk losing the record of individual reader's annotations and inscriptions. In Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library (Bookshop|Amazon), University of Virginia associate professor of English Andrew Stauffer chronicles a project to uncover and catalogue the "shadow archive" of history hidden in such volumes.

Joan from McKinney, Texas, wonders about the origin of the disparaging term knucklehead. It's a mild insult, and as with blockhead and bonehead, it suggests that someone's head is so full of blocks, bones, or knuckles that there's no room for brains. During World War II, the word knucklehead was popularized by a cartoon featuring Cadet RF Knucklehead, known for setting a comically bad example of things pilots shouldn't do.

Eric from Scranton, Pennsylvania, shares a funny story about having his hopes dashed as a 5-year-old when his teacher told the class they were going down the hall to the laboratory.