A caller wonders if she’s being hypersensitive about the way her boss addresses her in emails. Can the use of an employee’s first name ever reflect a power differential? And: a community choir director wants a term for “the act of...
Language is always evolving, and that’s also true for American Sign Language. A century ago, the sign for “telephone” was one fist below your mouth and the other at your ear, as if you’re holding an old-fashioned candlestick...
Why does the term vegetarian cause so much confusion? Some people assume it means avoiding red meat but still eating chicken. And is there a term for a vegetarian who also eats fish and poultry? Plus, screwball comedies from the 1930s mix slapstick...
Brittany in Green Coast Springs, Florida, says that when she was grumpy or irritated as a child, her mother would say a phrase that sounded like Don’t be such a scooch. This bit of Italian-American slang, often rendered as skutch, denotes a “pest”...
Roger from New Orleans, Louisiana, recalls that at odd moments in a conversation his father-in-law would toss in a puzzling non sequitur: I had one gunch, but the eggplant over there. That was probably a misunderstanding or misremembering of the...
A Vietnamese phrase suggesting the impossibility of something occurring translates as “when the loach lays eggs at the top of the banyan tree,” a loach being a bottom-dwelling fish. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “When the...