Marissa in Tallahassee, Florida, is puzzled when a friend observes that coffee goes through her like salts through a widow-woman, meaning that the beverage makes its way swiftly through her digestive system. The expression, which has been around since the 1860s, refers to the use of Epsom salts as a laxative. In other versions of this analogy, different verbs are used, including lit out, disappeared like, and hurried like. The list of what the salts are sometimes said to go through includes a hired girl, a tall Swede, a sick child, a weak man, a sick cow, a sick horse, a goose, and even a skeleton. 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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