The saying, “I ain’t lost nothin’ over there” is a dismissive way to say “Why in the world would I bother going to that place?” A similar version “you ain’t lost nothin’ down there,” appears in the play Trouble in Mind, by Alice Childress, the first...
Charles in Virginia asks about breaking bad, a phrase he grew up hearing to mean “raise hell,” “get wild,” or stop being nice, as in threatening to “break bad on” someone. Vince Gilligan, a Virginian, made the expression nationally familiar with the...

