Chase from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in Sacramento, California, where kids played Rochambeau instead of rock, paper, scissors. Why the difference in names? Nobody knows. Folklorists call this a choosing game, and while the hand-game itself...
Connie from Marana, Arizona, grew up being warned that Rawhead and Bloody Bones would get her if she went rummaging in closets or her grandmother’s hope chest. The creature—or sometimes a pair of creatures—dates at least as far back as the mid-16th...
Cria means a baby llama or alpaca. The English word comes from Spanish cría, related to criar, “to rear” or “to raise” a young animal. The four-letter word may seem merely like a useful Scrabble play, but it’s also the everyday term for those long...
A listener who grew up in Newfoundland remembers her grandfather declaring the fog was thick as burgoo. Turns out burgoo was sailors’ slang for a gray, gelatinous oatmeal—exactly the right image for an impenetrable Newfoundland fog. The word appears...
During the COVID-19 lockdown in the English countryside, writer Chloe Dalton stumbles upon a leveret no bigger than the width of her palm, lying motionless on a dirt road. Against her better judgment, she scoops it up. Most leverets in captivity die...
Jodi, a native of California’s Central Valley, grew up using the word erp (or urp or earp) for vomiting—only to discover as a child that no one outside her family had heard it. The Dictionary of American Regional English documents urp as...