When Marilyn from Boston, Massachusetts, used the expression Them’s the berries! with neighbors in her hometown of nearby Arlington, Massachusetts, she was surprised they were unfamiliar with it. The phrase means something like “That’s...
Mindy from Crescent, Iowa, grew up hearing about Herman, the son of her mother’s fearsome great aunt Julia, referred to as the woods colt. That phrase is a euphemism for “a child born out of wedlock.” Mindy’s mother said there was a man thought to...
Jill, who recently moved from Chicago, Illinois, to Indianapolis, Indiana, is bothered when restaurant servers say things like, “What would we like to order?” “Are we ready for the check?” and “Would we like dessert?” She says it doesn’t sound right...
In 1985, four young members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band traveled to the Soviet Union as tourists and met with refuseniks, most of them Jewish, who had applied to leave and were harassed, denied work, or wrongfully imprisoned. To encode vital...
Lee from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, remembers her Danish grandmother breaking up a loud argument between Lee’s mother and aunt by telling the twins, you sound like fishwives! To yell like a fishwife or to quarrel like a fishwife means to shout or...
A Fredericksburg, Virginia, man who once taught in the Aleut community of St. George Island, Alaska, asks about calidor, the local term for an unheated entryway or mudroom that buffers the house from Arctic weather. Calidor has an unusually well...