A North Carolina listener remembers that when she happened to predict things that later came true, her mother would say she had a goat’s mouth. Among other places, oi most of the islands in the Caribbean and also on the island of Mauritius, sayings...
Google Translate has expanded its offerings with 110 more languages, including major languages such as Cantonese, endangered languages such as Manx, and many less-spoken ones like Kallaalisut, used in Greenland, and Latgalian in Latvia. This is part...
The Kong in the name of the 1933 movie King Kong, probably alludes to the Congo in Africa, the home of gorillas. Previous movies used a form of that name as well; Kongorilla, for example. In the 1950s, the English name of the Japanese movie monster...
Connie in Santee, California, is curious about a term she read in Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed history of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon). A shotgun house is a narrow house, the width of one...
H. Auden’s poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” contains some lovely examples of the rhetorical device called adynaton, which are impossible things, including: I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you / Till China and Africa meet, / And the river jumps over...
Auntie and uncle are often used beyond the family tree as respectful terms for older adults who are close to the family but not blood relatives. Listeners reported this pattern in Uganda, Kenya, Cameroon, South Africa, India, the Philippines...
