Morgan from Los Angeles, California, has always used dingy (pronounced with a hard G, like dinghy) to describe that woozy, muddle-headed feeling that comes with being sick, a sense she picked up from her mother. Standard dictionaries offer entries close to this meaning, with definitions like “foolish” or “crazy,” but they don’t quite capture the specific physical sensation she describes. In digitized book archives, however, there are plenty of examples used just this way, including a football player feeling dingy after a concussion. The word likely comes from other, similar words suggesting something’s off-kilter, including dingbat, ding-dong, and ding-a-ling. This is part of a complete episode.
Those green plastic strips tucked between cuts of meat in supermarket display cases? They’re parsley runners, the result of recommendations from a professional color consultant hired by a grocery chain in the 1950s. Under bright store lights, the...
Daniel from Gardnerville, Nevada, remembers his aunt had a habit of responding to anyone who left the word so hanging there in mid-conversation with, Sew a button on your underwear. It’s is one of a whole family of playful rejoinders, including Sew...
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