What do you call a sticky, gooey, gross substance you can’t identify? Lee in San Antonio, Texas, calls it gookumpucky, a word she inherited from her mother and a great-grandmother descended from Czech and Polish immigrants. It belongs to a family of...
Jeff from Memphis, Tennessee, grew up in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky, where his coal-miner father raised green beans. When those beans couldn’t always be canned or frozen, the family threaded the full pods onto string, hung them in the...
To be creasing, or to be creased up, means you’re laughing so hard you’re doubled over at the waist, as if your belly has a big crease in it. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of ““Creasing” and “Creased Up”: Laughing So Hard You...
Hollis in Anchorage, Alaska, grew up on a small North Carolina farm, where her family applied the expression dyed in the wool to people with strong political or religious beliefs. The phrase originated with the idea of dyeing raw wool before...
Punctuation is more than a set of rules. In her book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World (Bookshop\|Amazon), writer Florence Hazrat traces the history of those dots and squiggles, showing how they convey tone...
Sarah from St. Augustine, Florida, asks if there’s a word for the accent we inherit from our parents. One useful term is idiolect, the unique blend of language each person speaks, and the handing down of speech habits from elders is called...
