Lisa calls from Huntsville, Alabama, to say that whenever Lisa was looking sharp in an attractive dress, one “tight enough to show that you’re a woman and loose enough to show that you’re a lady,” her mother would compliment her by saying her dress was sleazy. This adjective has undergone a transformation in the 300 years it’s been around. Early on, it referred to the lanugo or downy hair on the legs of insects or to something hairy or fuzzy. Sleazy later transferred to things that were thin or flimsy, and specifically to textiles or fabrics with those characteristics. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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