Andrea in West Palm Beach, Florida, recalls a little ditty that her father would recite to get her out of bed in the morning: When in the morning you throw moments away, you can’t make them up in the course of the day. Or you can hurry and...
If you alternate alcoholic beverages with glasses of water over the course of an evening, you’re said to be zebra striping. This bit of slang was inspired by how the animal’s alternating black-and-white markings are like the contrast between the...
In this bonus A Way with Words minicast, Martha and Grant look into the myriad stories behind the word cocktail. Does the drink name come from feathers? Horses? Something up a horse’s rump? It’s a weird wandering down etymology...
Martha from Rock Hill, South Carolina, wonders about the phrase She’s got the botts, meaning “she’s pouting.” The botts, also spelled the bots, refers to “a general malaise or moody spell,” and the bot in this case is the same bot in the botfly, a...
When a British tabloid reporter writing about a crocodile attack needed a synonym for crocodile, he went with knobbly monster, now a joking term for similarly creative ways of avoiding repetition. Juliet and Matthew Maguire, described by The...
Annie from Omaha, Nebraska, and her partner have been using the Merlin Bird ID app to study and identify birds. This makes them wonder how birds get their names and about the shorthand used to describe their calls. Bird-call mnemonics often use an...