Jacob in Frankfort, Kentucky, remembers that on foggy mornings in Appalachia, he’d hear grownups say that the groundhogs are making coffee. Writer Jesse Stuart, who served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate in the mid-1950s, wrote evocatively about how on such days little white clouds seem to cling to the mountains, inspiring a long tradition of linking them to the idea of animals making coffee or cooling their breakfast. This is part of a complete episode.
Two words from the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee prep materials: avahi, a term for a woolly lemur of Madagascar, and saltigrade, which describes spiders and other creatures that have feet and limbs adapted for leaping. Saltigrade is...
Louie from Black Hills, South Dakota, recalls the time his girlfriend fell off a paddleboard and into a lake, at which point his father declared She bit the farm! This peculiar locution is most likely his dad’s own combination of two...
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