William from Fort Worth, Texas, remembers dabbing monkey blood on cuts and scrapes and wonders why anyone would call a medicine that. The nickname refers most often to the bright red antiseptic Mercurochrome, and it has also been applied to iodine...
Our conversation about Spanish idioms involving food prompted a tweet from Tijuana, Mexico: del plato a la boca, se cae la sopa, or between the dish and the mouth, the soup spills, or don’t count your chickens before they hatch. A similar idea is...
Martha shares a poem by Mexican-American poet Sandra Cisneros, “Peaches—Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo.” It’s from My Wicked, Wicked Ways. (The poem is copyright 1987 by Sandra Cisneros. By special arrangement with Third Woman Press. Published by...
The word hoosegow means jail, and derives from the Spanish word for tribunal, juzgado. In some dialects of Spanish, the D sound is not pronounced. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Juzgado > Hoosegow” Hello, you have A Way with...
In English, if someone’s terrified, we might say they are shaking like a leaf. In Spanish, the phrase is temblar como un flan, or to tremble like a flan, the dessert dish. The Spanish phrase darle la vuelta a la tortilla literally means to flip the...
The Spanish phrase estar en la edad del pavo literally translates as “to be in the age of the turkey” — to be at an awkward age. Comer pavo, literally “to eat turkey,” means to sit alone at a dance because no one has asked you to join them. The...
