Patricia Wentworth’s 1937 mystery The Case is Closed (Bookshop|Amazon) includes a character who disparages others as being dreepy or a dreep. These words are Dreep and dreepy are Scottish dialect versions of drip and drippy and have to do with someone who’s ineffective, weak, soft, or otherwise gormless. This is part of a complete episode.
In Hong Kong English, Add oil! means something like “Go on!” or “Go for it!” A recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, this expression of encouragement comes from Cantonese (加油 or gā yáu; rendered as jiāyóu from Mandarin) and draws on the...
A Green Bay Packers fan wonders why a quarterback who’s tackled is said to be sacked. The roots of the word sack as in “bag” goes back thousands of years, all the way to Akkadian, later spreading through Greek, Latin, and then to Romance and...
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