Margaret from Huntsville, Alabama, says her mother used to tell her to hurry up by saying to get something done with a burning needle and a hot thread. The more common expression is with a hot needle and burning thread, meaning to do something “quickly” or in a “slapdash manner.” Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys used it that way in their 1952 recording of “A Red Hot Needle.” In parts of the Caribbean, hot needle burn thread alludes to something done in haste, as in That wedding got to be hot needle burning thread because the bride is already pregnant. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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