Following our conversation about fossicking for gemstones, a listener in Melbourne, Australia, points out that where he’s from, emu is slang for a person who picks up discarded tickets at a racetrack, hoping to find an accidentally discarded winner, bending over in the manner of Australia’s largest native bird searching for food. In the United States, these ticket scavengers are called stoopers. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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