To put on the dog refers to ostentatious behavior and, in particular, to dressing in a flashy way. What do dogs have to do with stylish clothing? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Put on the Dog is About Dressing Up”...
Private Voices, also known as the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, is an online archive of thousands of letters written by soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Because the soldiers lacked formal education and wrote “by ear,” the collection is a...
In the Private Voices corpus of American Civil War letters, soldiers use pill and pills for bullets, including Lincoln’s pills and Abe’s pills. The slang is far older than the Civil War. Pill referred to cannonballs by at least the 1600s and to...
A Huntsville, Alabama, man finds that his younger co-workers have never heard the phrase going to hell in a handbasket. Although the expression is at least as old as the U.S. Civil War, its etymology remains unclear. In the early 1960s, the humorist...
The origin of skedaddle, meaning to “run away in a panic” or “flee,” has proved elusive. Renowned etymologist Anatoly Liberman suggests it may be related to a Scottish term, skeindaddle, meaning “to spill.” Its...
Looking glegged up, with staring into space with the mouth agape, comes from glegged, which shows up in some old dialect dictionaries meaning “to look askance.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Glegged”...