June in Miami, Florida, says every time she hears the name of this show, she’s reminded of a story that involves the tradition of fruit-filled Easter buns in her native Jamaica. She’d put hers on a windowsill at work, but at some point when she left...
A retired Montana listener says a buddy fondly referred to their friend group as geezers, a joking term for a person, usually male, who’s advanced in years, possibly with too much time on their hands. In 19th-century England, the word geezer more...
Katie in Tallahassee, Florida, saw a friend cooking with what she called a Scottish spurtle, a kitchen utensil that looks like a wooden dowel with a knob on the end, used to stir hot cereals and rice. Soon after, her husband saw an infomercial on...
Patricia Wentworth’s 1937 mystery The Case is Closed (Bookshop|Amazon) includes a character who disparages others as being dreepy or a dreep. These words are Dreep and dreepy are Scottish dialect versions of drip and drippy and have to do with...
How did quid come to be British slang for that unit of currency called a pound? It’s tempting to assume this quid is from Latin quid pro quo, meaning “something for something.” However, a more likely explanation may be that...
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...
