A listener in Colby, Wisconsin, says that growing up, she called a drink with ice cream in root beer a black cow. But when she moved to Wisconsin, she found that the locals called the same beverage a root beer float. The era of drugstore fountains and soda jerk slang led to lots of colorful names for these bubbly beverages, including brown cow (chocolate ice cream in root beer), purple cow (grape soda and vanilla ice cream), orange cow (orange soda and vanilla ice cream). Other colorful drink names include mud fizz and black-and-white. In Australia and New Zealand, where ice cream and soda drinks are called spiders, you can have a lime spider or an orange spider. In some Spanish speaking countries, a cola-flavored drink with ice cream is a vaca negra or vaca preta, both of which mean “black cow.” This is part of a complete episode.
In English, you can express skepticism with the classic saying when pigs fly. In Tagalog, a similar sentiment is expressed with a phrase that translates “when the crow turns white, when the heron turns black,” and there’s a Hungarian phrase that...
Dax in Santa Cruz, California, wonders: Now that we’re into the 21st century, when will people stop saying that initial 20 when referring to a year such as 2028 the way we dropped the 19 in the term 1980s and just started referring to the ’80s? This...
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