Learning that fat meat is greasy, which means learning something the hard way, is a common idiom used almost exclusively in the African-American community, and refers to a juicy cut of the pig called fatmeat. Linguist Geneva Smitherman has a great...
Particularly in the African-American community, the affectionate term son is often used for more than just young male offspring—most anyone can be addressed as son. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Addressing as...
White on rice isn’t a racist idiom. It likens closeness, stickiness, or being “all over” a task to white rice, long the default rice on many U.S. tables and often sticky. The expression shows up often in African American English, and Geneva...
Evita, calling from Los Angeles and living in Chula Vista, California, asks about saditty or seditty, an African-American term for someone — usually a woman — who acts stuck-up or as if she’s better than others. The word appears in African-American...
What’s the antidote to living in a sound-bite world? How about unwinding with luxuriously expressive prose? Also, the cloak-and-dagger world of editing dictionary entries. Plus, what you might say instead of cursing, and oddball Scrabble words...
