In New York and northern New Jersey, a children’s playground slide was once commonly known as sliding pond or sliding pon. The terms reflect the considerable influence of Dutch settlement in that area, the Dutch word baan meaning a “path” and...
Writer Jhumpa Lahiri grew up speaking Bengali and later English, then became passionately devoted to a third language, Italian. Her book In Other Words: A Memoir (Bookshop|Amazon) is a love letter to Italian and a vivid account of the challenges and...
A Nevada listener says her mother used to ask her to collect the pearls after a meal, meaning “gather up all the unused dishes and utensils that didn’t need to be washed.” In Australian slang, such an item is often called a sunbeam. This is part of...
Kinsey from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is looking for a term that denotes the silence that falls around a dinner table when the food arrives and everyone is really enjoying it. Some possibilities include German gefressenes Schweigen, or “voracious...
Dorothy Sayers’ 1935 novel, Gaudy Night (Bookshop|Amazon) includes a memorable description of late winter transitioning into early spring, noting that “February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March.” This is part of a...
Carol in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, recalls her mother using the word meckle to mean “mess around with,” as in stop meckling with your cereal and eat it! Or if a sewing project was too complicated, she’d say there was too much meckling involved...