Lucy in Louisa, Virginia, recalls that if her mother was exasperated when the kids were misbehaving, she’d announce I’m going to put you both in a wet paper bag and see who falls out first! This is part of a complete episode.
David says that when he was growing up in Akron, Ohio, his family referred to the grassy area between the sidewalk and street as the devil strip. He’s since moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he doesn’t hear that term. There are lots...
Ben Yagoda’s new book Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English, based on his blog Not One-Off Britishisms, which features words and phrases that are originally British but are being used more and more in the States, including...
Charlotte from Princeton, Kentucky, wonders: What’s the difference between a spider web and a cobweb? There’s a bit of semantic differentiation between the two: A cobweb is usually an old spider web, while a spider web that’s not...
Ahmed, a native speaker of Arabic who also speaks French, wonders how he should pronounce words from those languages when speaking English. For example, should he model the pronunciation for the name of the writer Kahlil Ghibran the country of Qatar...
Sara in Madison, Wisconsin, was reading an old edition of The Joy of Cooking and came across a recipe that described a cake’s ingredients as earrings for an elephant. She couldn’t discern whether the authors meant that was a good thing...