Samantha from Charleston, South Carolina, says her mother and grandmother are of Italian heritage, and have always advised keeping one’s neck warm as a precaution against the malaria. That sort of consigli della nonna, or “Grandmother’s advice” stems from folklore associating mal aria — literally, “bad air,” with disease and pestilence. The life-threatening, infectious disease called malaria also derives from Italian for “bad air.” Before the rise of germ theory, people assumed that one could get sick from the “bad air” in swamps. 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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