What do you call a sticky, gooey, gross substance you can’t identify? Lee in San Antonio, Texas, calls it gookumpucky, a word she inherited from her mother and a great-grandmother descended from Czech and Polish immigrants. It belongs to a family of...
When a team or player is on the schneid, it means they’re in a performance or scoring slump. But if they get off the schneid, it means they’re winning or playing their best again. It’s a clipped form of Schneider, from the earlier off the Schneider...
The proverb when in Rome, do as the Romans do suggests one should respect local customs and traditions, but also more generally that sometimes it’s better to go along with a group’s consensus than resist and make a fuss. But why in Rome and not in...
Sarah from St. Augustine, Florida, asks if there’s a word for the accent we inherit from our parents. One useful term is idiolect, the unique blend of language each person speaks, and the handing down of speech habits from elders is called...
Punctuation is more than a set of rules. In her book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World (Bookshop\|Amazon), writer Florence Hazrat traces the history of those dots and squiggles, showing how they convey tone...
Hollis in Anchorage, Alaska, grew up on a small North Carolina farm, where her family applied the expression dyed in the wool to people with strong political or religious beliefs. The phrase originated with the idea of dyeing raw wool before...
