A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain. A rising is a swelling, and a rising in my leader is a swelling in a muscle or tendon. A pone is also a lump, the word adapted from a similar-sounding Virginia Algonquian word referring to “bread” or “something baked,” as in corn pone. In the dialect of Appalachia, the letter A was historically appended to verbs, as in a-coming or a-going, the initial a- deriving from the preposition at, and originally indicating the progressive form of a verb. This is part of a complete episode.
What makes a great first line of a book? How do the best authors put together an initial sentence that draws you in and makes you want to read more? We’re talking about the openings of such novels as George Orwell’s 1984...
To slip someone a mickey means to doctor a drink and give it to an unwitting recipient. The phrase goes back to Mickey Finn of the Lone Star Saloon in Chicago, who in the late 19th century was notorious for drugging certain customers and relieving...
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