A listener in Colby, Wisconsin, says that growing up, she called a drink with ice cream in root beer a black cow. But when she moved to Wisconsin, she found that the locals called the same beverage a root beer float. The era of drugstore fountains...
When your server brings food to the table and inquires as to who ordered which dish, that’s informally known in the restaurant biz as auctioning. If your meal is delayed because the person who took your order forgot about it, that’s called a pocket...
Candace from Memphis, Tennessee, wonders about the phrase You’re eating me out of house and home. The emphatic doublet house and home is part of a long tradition that includes scared out of house and home and chased out of house and home. Even...
Amy from Charlotte, North Carolina, reports a dispute arose when visiting her brother’s family. Is a large container for storing sugar properly called a can or a canister? The answer involves prototype theory, which in cognitive linguistics and...
Clabberhead is a mild rebuke that suggests someone has a curdled dairy product for brains, clabber being sour milk, ultimately from an Irish Gaelic term for “mud.” The Dictionary of American Regional English has a good history of clabberhead. In...
In English, a clumsy persona may be said to have butterfingers, but Italians refer to such a person with a phrase that translates as “having pastry-dough hands.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Pastry-Dough Hands” In English, we...
