David from Nashville, Tennessee, wonders about a word he’s heard only in that city: gherming. Someone who ghermsmakes a habit of pestering country-music celebrities or acting overly familiar with them in public. Nashville songwriter Marc Alan Barnette has observed that when a friend was being wheeled into a hospital emergency room, he was even ghermed by a nurse trying to elbow her way into the industry. The word’s origin is unclear, although it may be related to the term gurn, meaning to “contort one’s face,” possibly in an obsequious manner. 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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