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.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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