Victor, a film noir fan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says closed captioning has made him newly aware of dialogue he’d previously missed. Watching The Maltese Falcon, for example, he ran into the phrase crackin’ foxy. The crack is the same crack as to crack a joke or to crack wise, meaning “to make a remark,” and the foxy has to do with having cunning, fox-like qualities. So someone who’s cracking foxy is being deviously clever. This is part of a complete episode.
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...
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