David says that when he was growing up in Akron, Ohio, his family referred to the grassy area between the sidewalk and street as the devil strip. He’s since moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he doesn’t hear that term. There are lots of terms for this, depending on which part of the United States you’re in, including the parkway, the parking, the parking strip, the boulevard, the tree belt, the tree lawn, the berm, and neutral ground. But the name devil strip is peculiar to Ohio, especially Akron, and the term figures in a great story about forensic linguistics. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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