We have books for language-lovers and recommendations for history buffs. • How did the word boondoggle come to denote a wasteful project? The answer involves the Boy Scouts, a baby, a craft project, and a city council meeting. • Instead of reversing just individual letters, some palindromes are sentences with reversed word order. • Also squeaky clean, dad, icebox, search it up, pretend vs. pretentious, toe-counting rhymes, comb the giraffe, a Korean song about carrots, a word game, and more.

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