If something pales in comparison to something else, the reference is to its intensity decreasing next to something even brighter. The pale in this case is unrelated to the one in beyond the pale, which has to do with territory marked by a literal...
The expression to turn on a dime means “to change quickly.” Early on the phrase referred to horses or horse-drawn vehicles and later to motorized ones, and suggested the idea of changing direction quickly and easily without needing a large turning...
The first person on your street to put out the trash and recycling? That’s your street’s binfluencer, a combination of bin and influencer. In the UK, this term is sometimes used to denote someone who encourages recycling and waste reduction. In the...
Do you refer to nighttime sleepwear as jammies, jommies, or something else? A Nashville, Tennessee, woman says that her family referred to pajamas as jommies, while her husband’s family always called them jammies. Although jammies is the far more...
In English, a clumsy persona may be said to have butterfingers, but Italians refer to such a person with a phrase that translates as “having pastry-dough hands.” This is part of a complete episode.
Matt in Beloit, Wisconsin, reports that when he was in high school back in the 1990s, he and his friends used the word biscuit in phrases like I feel like a biscuit or I bet you feel like a biscuit now, the idea being that someone said something...