Say you’re on a long road trip. Do you have a term for another driver who happens to be traveling the same direction and sets the pace for your car mile after mile? In an earlier episode, a Rhode Island listener left us wondering why her Swedish friend refers to such a driver as a Follow John. A listener in Malmö, Sweden, has since stepped in with an explanation. In that country, children play a game similar to “Simon Says” called Följa John, or “Follow John.” That helpful Swedish listener, by the way, is Karin Tidbeck, author of The Memory Theater (Bookshop|Amazon), which appears on the New York Times list of best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021. 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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