In American English, khaki has come to connote “business casual,” but it comes from the Farsi word for “earthy.” In the 1840s, the British picked it up in the north of India as a descriptor for their sturdy soldiers’ pants that matched the color of dust. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
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...