Margie from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says that sometimes her childhood behavior scared the daylights out of her mother, but she never understood exactly what that actually meant beyond giving her mother a terrible fright. In the past, the word...
During a live appearance on Louisiana’s Red River Radio, a listener introduced Martha to a phrase worth savoring: when the moistures meet. In the world of traditional farming, where the moistures meet refers to the moment when soil moisture and...
Matt from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was puzzled when colleagues kept saying someone had stood up at a wedding, indicating that they’d been a member of the wedding party. The expression stood up in that sense is an Americanism going back about two...
Susan from Virginia Beach, Virginia, shares the phrase her mother used when the kids refused to eat: It’ll grow hair on your back teeth. This supposed motivator likely blends two older traditions: a German idiom, Haare auf den Zähnen haben...
A useful new expression: AI breath. It’s associated with writing that feels stale and impersonal. As AI-generated prose becomes easier to spot, we’ll likely be getting more and more whiffs of AI breath. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...
Why do regional accents develop, and why is it so difficult to shake one later in life? Valerie Friedman, a linguist at the University of Nevada, Reno, tackles those questions and more in Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents...