Jill from Maryville, Missouri, and her 11-year-old son Ryan are wondering about the phrases I have a hankering to do something and I’m fixing to do something. Growing up in East Central Nebraska, Jill heard family and friends use them synonymously...
Heidi from Reno, Nevada, shares a bar game in which players take turns trying to recite by memory the increasingly long concatenation of phrases one fat hen, a couple of ducks, three brown bear, four running hare, five fickle female, six simple...
The terms upper-case and lower-case to designate the size of letters stem from printer’s slang from the days of typesetting. Since they used small letters most of the time, so they were kept in a case that was lower, and therefore more easily...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski calls this week’s puzzle “Three of a Kind, Four of a Kind,” but it has nothing to do with cards. The challenge is to find words that have either three occurrences of a letter or four. For example, if the letter in question is...
Why do we speak of the red, white, and blue when discussing the American flag? Why not blue, white, and red or white, red, and blue? A couple of reasons: The color order lodged in the language thanks in part to the patriotic song from the 1840s...
A Louisiana listener shares a favorite passage from Laurie Lee’s memoir Cider with Rosie (Bookshop|Amazon), about his boyhood in post-World-War II England. An extract is here and contains the passage:“For the first time in my life I was out of the...
