A listener in Enterprise, Alabama, recalls that when a storm was approaching his grandfather would say “It’s going to come up a Joe Moore.” The slang term Joe Moore comes from the word mojo, meaning a magic spell or magic power. By metathesis, which is what linguists call the transposition of letters or sounds in a word, mojo became jomo, and ultimately Joe Moore. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
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...