Susannah in Aiken, South Carolina, is curious about slumgullion, a word her dad used to denote “gooey baby food” or “goopy oatmeal.” Slumgullion originated with the California gold rush, when miners forced large quantities of water through soil to flush away lighter components and leave heavier ones, including gold nuggets. The discarded, sludgy wastewater was called slumgullion, probably from slum, similar to slime, and gullion, either “a muddy cesspool” or “a type of stomachache.” Slumgullion may also be related to slobgollion, a term Herman Melville used in Moby-Dick (Bookshop|Amazon) to mean “the discarded offal of a whale.” This is part of a complete episode.
Two words from the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee prep materials: avahi, a term for a woolly lemur of Madagascar, and saltigrade, which describes spiders and other creatures that have feet and limbs adapted for leaping. Saltigrade is...
Louie from Black Hills, South Dakota, recalls the time his girlfriend fell off a paddleboard and into a lake, at which point his father declared She bit the farm! This peculiar locution is most likely his dad’s own combination of two...
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