Why do we write the sound of a dog barking as bow wow? Isn’t that noise more like woof, woof or arf, arf or ruff ruff? Surprisingly, the oldest of these is bow wow, or as William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest (Bookshop|Amazon), bowgh wawgh...
Vogelheu—literally, “Vogelheu”—is a Swiss dish with toasted bread, cubed and cooked with eggs and other ingredients for a tasty meal that makes efficient use of leftover bread. This is part of a complete episode.
While reading Dean Koontz’s book The House at the End of the World (Bookshop|Amazon), a listener in Ramona, California, encountered the perfect word for the walks he takes with his dog. He now refers to such an excursion as a sniffari. This is...
A listener who spent years in Ethiopia and Eritrea learning the Tigrinya language shares two sayings he learned there, both having to do with poultry. One translates as, “In its own good time an egg will walk on its own legs.” The other...
Sigrin writes from Albany, New York, that she misheard our earlier conversation about the expression shaving yak hair meaning “performing a monotonous, tedious task.” At first she thought we said shaving gnat hair, which she figures is...
We’ve talked before about dog rescue groups’ convention of naming litters of puppies according to a theme. Any idea why a recent litter of pups included Ramp, Slingshot, Kicker, and Flipper? They were all named for terms involved in pinball...