Susan from Asheville, North Carolina, is surprised that fellow members of her writers’ group didn’t understand her use of the phrase I was on my ear meaning “I was upset.” This expression and variants of it have been around since at least the 1860s. To spin around on your ear means “to get violently angry,” to go off on your ear or to slide out on your ear means to depart angrily. Or telling someone Walk off on your ear is the equivalent of telling them to go to hell. Future U.S. president Harry Truman described his own father as being on his ear when Truman failed to show up somewhere on time. This is part of a complete episode.
Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...
Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...
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