Megan from Savannah, Georgia, is curious about a phrase her father used: down cellar behind the axe, a phrase whose meaning she never quite understood. Down cellar, meaning “down in the cellar,” is common in New England and the Canadian Maritimes...
Brian from Lafayette, Indiana, wonders why chicken is abbreviated CHX in the restaurant industry. Using X as a substitute or shortener has a long history. Medieval scribes sometimes drew a line through the final stroke of an abbreviated word. This...
Kelly from Butte, Montana, recalls that when a few morsels remained at the end of a meal, her grandmother would say, Make it a nice day tomorrow, meaning everyone should eat all their food. A version used by a childhood friend’s family was...
Ever thought there ought to be an English word for this or that phenomenon? Such holes in the language are called lexical gaps. A listener in Ontario, Canada, notes that English lacks a single word for the mistake voice-to-text programs make when...
Justin from Fort Worth, Texas, heard a coworker warn against getting whistlebit, or “still being at work when the quitting whistle blows.” (Remember Fred Flintstone in the quarry?) The term whistlebit follows the pattern of snakebit, a slang term in...
Aman from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, grew up in a region of India where an e– sound was added to English words beginning with consonant clusters, such as scooter and school. Later he noticed the same pattern in Spanish. The sound-sequencing...