Pam in Eureka, California, says that when her mother and grandmother would enter a particularly dark room, they’d remark that it was dark as the inside of a goat. Mark Twain used the phrase dark as the inside of a cow in his book Roughing It as well as The Innocents Abroad. Other versions: dark as the inside of a whale, cat, black cat, a sack, a horse, a magician’s hat, a coal scuttle, the Devil’s waistcoat pocket, and as the inside of a needle. Joyce Cary wrote about something being as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister, and Groucho Marx also had something to say about the inside of a dog. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...