To have one’s work cut out for you comes from an earlier phrase to have all one’s work cut out. Picture a tailor who’s working as fast as possible with the help of an assistant who’s cutting out the pieces to be sewn. If you...
A listener in Abilene, Texas, wonders about the expression that smarts! The verb to smart, meaning to sting or cause sharp pain, goes back more than a thousand years. The adjective smart, meaning intelligent, evolved from that sense of something...
Amy from Abilene, Texas, is moving to the Northeast, and a realtor in her new hometown told her that once the paperwork went through, bada boom, bada bing, she’d have a new home. Amy and her husband had only heard it in movies and on TV...
A silly joke about a parrot made the rounds of 19th-century American newspapers and may be the source for our expression “cry uncle,” meaning “to give up.” The anecdote features a boastful owner who orders a pet parrot to speak the word “uncle,” but...
Nathan from Abilene, Texas, asked for a dolly at a London trade-show venue and got blank looks until he described the device, which the workers called a trolley. Names for these wheeled haulers vary even in the United States: for some people, a...
Unlike smelling a rat, smelling a mouse isn’t necessarily a bad thing — you could smell a mouse, thereby sussing out that someone has good news to share, or just a fun prank to play. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...