The backstory on “Snug as a bug in a rug.” (Spoiler Alert: Ben Franklin didn’t actually coin it.)

In 1771, Ben Franklin’s common-law wife, Deborah Read Franklin shipped a live gift to young Georgiana Shipley, the daughter of British friends in London. It was an American gray squirrel…

“How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?”

The phrase “beautiful people” had been used prior to the 1960s. For example, in Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband, a social comedy first performed in 1895, one of the…