Pete in Minneapolis, Minnesota, wonders about the word canooper, which he’s heard used to refer to a type of alcoholic beverage. Also spelled kanuper, this word is rarely found outside Minnesota. Its origin is uncertain, although Red Fisher, host of a fishing show that ran on Canadian television from 1963 to 1989, once told interviewer Vicki Gabereau that he made it up himself. The earliest uses of this word in print appear in the 1970s. 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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