Kieran in Huntsville, Alabama, wonders about the term laid an egg meaning performed badly. The expression to lay an egg goes back at least as far as cricket matches in the 1860s, where duck’s egg referred to a zero on a scoreboard. Later in...
Joe in Huntsville, Alabama, says an elderly friend consistently says hope to mean help. For more than a century, some speakers in parts of the Southern United States drop the L sound before another consonant in words, which then affects the adjacent...
Cindy in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is going through her mother’s diary from the 1930’s and finds the term high-hat used as a transitive verb. To high-hat someone means to act in a supercilious, condescending, affected manner, as if...
At Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, students use snack for an attractive person: someone who looks like a good snack. A step up from that is whole meal, for someone even more appealing. Snack in this sense is fairly widespread in the United...
During a visit to Lee High School in Huntstville, Alabama, we collected a treasure trove of slang, including a term that seems to be particular to the Huntsville area: forf, which as a verb means to fail to follow through on commitments, and as a...
A Huntsville, Alabama, physical therapist notes that patients with a hamstring cramp will sometimes say “I’ve got a rising in my leader.” Rising is a dialect term for swelling, and leader is a dialect term for tendon or muscle...