Dan from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in south Louisiana, where speakers of Cajun French say garde de donc! to mean “Well, would you look at that!” or “Can you believe this?” The phrase is used to point out something foolish or surprising. The same idea may be rendered as mais garde donc or garde donc or garde mais donc, the garde coming from the French word meaning “look at” and the donc meaning “there.” It’s unrelated to the term gaga, which originates in French hospital slang gâteux, referring to someone who lacks all their faculties. This is part of a complete episode.
Unparalleled misalignments are pairs of phrases in which the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other, but the phrases themselves mean different things. For example, the phrase blanket statement can be paired with cover story...
Jameela in Charlotte, North Carolina, says her family refers to their television’s remote control as the clicker, but her friends insist on calling it the remote. These devices go by other names as well, including doofer, flicker, zapper, and...
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