Penny in Savannah, Georgia, recalls that her father, a Navy veteran who served in the South Pacific, would say of someone who was clueless or didn’t know what he was talking about: That person doesn’t know if he’s punched, bored, or drifted. There are lots of versions, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia, all of them metaphorically referring to the action of woodworking tools on wood, which included such verbs as drilled, countersunk, reamed, and tapered. Other versions include bored, punched, drilled, or countersunk and punched, bored, or burnt out by lightning. This is part of a complete episode.
When you’re talking about the location of an inanimate object, is it okay to say that it lives there, as in The peanut butter lives in that cabinet or The flashlight lives on that shelf? Strictly speaking, of course, that object isn’t...
Sean in Oneonta, New York, says that when he was growing up in New Jersey, his family would pile in the car and set off on a surprise adventure, whether a short distance or long, and the kids would be told only that they were going on Buxtehude...
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