After our conversation about various names for a television remote control, a listener emailed to say that early remote controls produced an audible tone that activated the TV channel changer and volume, and whenever his dogs Lupe and Bubba stood up and shook themselves, the sound of the jangling tags on their collars changed the TV channels. 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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