Nancy in Newport, Kentucky, says friends used to refer to her young son and daughter as a pigeon pair. Doves and pigeons tend to have two chicks at a time, and at one point, it was believed that these offspring consisted of one male and female. Shakespeare alluded to a dove’s golden couplet, meaning such a pair. In Dutch, siblings are referred to with terms that translate as “a rich man’s wish” or a “king’s wish,” or even a koningspaar, which means “royal couple.” In French, they’re souhait de roi, or “king’s wish.” In Scots, a doos cleckin, or “dove’s hatching,” is a set of twins, usually fraternal. A pigeon pair refrigerator is a single-door refrigerator that stands beside a matching single-door upright freezer. 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...