That sputtering noise when someone sticks out their tongue, puts their lips together, and blows is called a raspberry. No one knows the origin of this slang term, although it may have to do with that pileup of consonants colliding in the middle of the word raspberry. It’s been suggested that it’s a shortening of rhyming slang term raspberry tart, which rhymes with “fart,” but experts in Cockney rhyming slang are skeptical. It might have started among theatergoers noisily expressing their disapproval that way. Another term for that is the bird, or the big bird, or just bird, possibly a reference to the sound a duck makes. This sound is part of what’s known as the Bronx cheer. 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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