In English, you might describe something easy to do as a cinch or a piece of cake. Several other languages employ tasty metaphors to convey a similar idea. In Brazilian Portuguese, you something easy can be described with an idiom that translates as...
After our conversation about terms for ice cream trucks, a listener reports that her harried mother used to tell her kids that the cheery sounds wafting through their neighborhood were from the music truck. This is part of a complete episode.
If you have enough for Coxey’s army, you have heaping helpings of it. The phrase goes back to the 1890s, when the United States was in the midst of an economic depression. Activist Jacob Coxey led a ragtag group of hungry protesters across the...
Tim from Jacksonville, Florida, gets teased for the way he says the word milk, which he pronounces as melk and the word eggs, which he pronounces as aigs. It’s not uncommon for what linguists call lax vowel lowering to occur, and these...
What do you call the edge of the crust left on a pizza once you’ve eaten through the part with all the toppings? Some people refer to this as a dough-lip, a pizza bone, or a pizza handle, or a pizza rind. It’s also been called the...
Responding to our conversation about alternatives to the term mocktail, Rob in Wolcott, New York, reports on our Facebook group that he recently saw the term zero-proof drink to describe an alcohol-free beverage — a sophisticated cocktail of harissa...
