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.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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