Morning Stories

The impact was less hard than expected. But the burning on my cheek was impossible to ignore — and good advice was hard to come by. It felt like a clap in the face. Though this very thing — advice in certain situations — is often an uninvited guest. Or the fifth wheel on the wagon.

Risk? What reads here like the name of a chocolate bar turns out to be far more complex in practice — and rarely comes with any sweetness attached.

A sentence heard often and understood rarely has burned itself into memory. Precisely because it was blown into the air — the hot air — so many times. What could the underlying motivation have been, to push those four words plus exclamation mark into a small boy's ears?

Oh no! There he is again – popping up out of seemingly nowhere, without warning. When a word gets dissected into its parts, the original meaning starts to crumble a little. But the variants that emerge are all the more revealing. More often than not, the man – or, well, the man – steps out from the shadow of the word combination and makes himself at home. Again. Or maybe he never left.

Well, another word has nestled itself into the conversation — one that carries this particular, wake-you-up quality: Hopeium. A blend of hope and some metallic-sounding suffix, -ium. Hope is metallic? No. Hope is magnetic.

Two-edged? Isn't that just standard in the production of a sword? Anyway, the comparison doesn't limp — because the sword hasn't been used yet. Or so I think.

What does "cyranomising" mean? Christian Wehrli explores why Cyrano de Bergerac reveals more about language, love, and communication than any textbook. An essay on Rostand, rhetoric, and the power of words.

Every human shares this fate — and yet the whole world congratulates us for it every year. An essay about humanity's most universal black out.

There are certain words that never sound good to teenage ears. Tradition is one of them.