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...
The British expression send to Coventry means “to ostracize,” and likely derives from the time of the English Civil War, when the town of Coventry served as a holding site for captured Royalist soldiers. By the 18th century, the phrase also came to...
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...
