fork hand road
n.— «Fork hand road. The hand you use your fork in. A traveler was passing through the piney woods of Clarke County, Alabama, and stopped at a house where a woman was hoeing in the garden to inquire his way to a certain house. She told him to keep going until he came to the forks of the road, where he should take the fork-hand. He asked what she meant by the fork-hand. She replied impatiently that it could be nothing but the hand in which he held his fork.» —by Harry Harrison Kroll in George Peabody College for Teachers A Comparative Study of Upper and Lower Southern Folk Speech (Martin, Tennesee) Aug., 1925. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Asthenosphere, a geologist’s term for the molten layer beneath the earth’s crust, sparks a journey that stretches all the way from ancient Greece to the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Plus: What the heck is a dogberg? It’s when...
Janet in Montgomery, Alabama, reports that a day after she had surgery on her hand, the wound burst open, and a doctor noted that her wound dehisced. She’s used to hearing dehisce used in botany to mean the splitting of a plant structure to...