We were invited to Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, to talk with students about slang. During our previous visit in 2018, we learned the apparently hyperlocal slang term forf meaning “to flake out” or “someone who fails to follow through.” This time students reported that this word is still sometimes used. There’s also touch grass, meaning to “get a reality check” or “push away from the computer screen and experience the offline world.” Dog water denotes “something undesirable.” They’re also using giving in a novel way: Someone who resembles a Hobbit might be said to be giving Bilbo Baggins. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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