When Sean in New York City contemplated telling his boss he wasn’t coming into work the next day, he texted a friend that he might bang out sick. He wonders about the phrase, which he picked up from his father, a police dispatcher in New York City. The more common expression is bang in sick, although both variants are used. In his 2006 book The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (Amazon), Grant traced the phrase back to the 1980s, although he’s since followed it back to the 1960s. It’s particularly common among firefighters, police officers, and other civil servants in New York, Boston, and other cities along the U.S. East Coast. This is part of a complete episode.
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...
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