Following our conversation about the secret cup code of the old Harvey House restaurant chain, a listener in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shares a far more complicated and efficient restaurant code, the elaborate plate marking system used at Waffle House...
Jennifer, a tutor in Tallahassee, Florida, wonders what to call a segment of an orange. Among botanists, it’s a carpel. Informally, it’s a segment, slice, wedge, peg, or pig. It may be that these segments are called pigs, because all...
Jodie in Norfolk, Virginia, reports that a new restaurant there serving New Haven-style pizza is called District Apizza, pronounced “ah-BEETS.” The word apizza is a remnant of the language of Italian immigrants who settled in...
Some gems in this week’s mailbag: Following up on our conversation with a caller hoping to promote less-violent alternatives to the phrase kill two birds with one stone, a listener who grew up in India wrote in with one from her native...
A Tucson, Arizona, couple is still laughing about the husband’s misunderstanding of the term soup tureen. This is part of a complete episode.
Shuba in Sammamish, Washington, grew up in India, where she heard speakers of Indian English refer to an eggplant as a brinjal. She assumed that this was a British English term, but later realized that in Britain, this vegetable is called an...
