In one episode of The Great Pottery Throwdown, a soothing British reality show that features amateur ceramicists, someone jokes about spending a night on the tiles. In this case, the phrase has nothing to do with crafting tiles from clay. A night on...
The word pobbies refers to a warm mixture of milk, bread, and sugar that British mothers traditionally gave children to fill them up or soothe them when they were unwell. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Have Some Pobbies for...
Among London cabbies, a musher is somebody who owns their own cab, a starving musher is someone still paying for their cab, and musher’s lotion is rain. The book Schott’s Significa: A Miscellany of Secret Languages (Bookshop|Amazon)...
The first person on your street to put out the trash and recycling? That’s your street’s binfluencer, a combination of bin and influencer. In the UK, this term is sometimes used to denote someone who encourages recycling and waste reduction. In the...
In the thriller Down Cemetery Road starring Emma Thompson, a character uses the Briticism safe as houses, meaning “quite safe,” an expression thought to derive either from the sturdiness of a house or the sense of real estate as a secure investment...
Amy in Bozeman, Montana, grew up hearing her parents say “Coventry” on noisy family road trips, meaning “be quiet,” often followed by “and fold your hands.” The family usage may be related to the British expression send to Coventry, meaning “to...
