Chris in Northampton, Massachusetts, and his mother are debating whether you can refer to your dog as somebody? Is it reasonable to say your pet is a someone rather than a something? Strictly speaking, dictionaries define the word someone as...
Two examples of adynaton, the rhetorical term for playful exaggeration suggesting that something will never happen, involve animals’ tails. One German expression translates as “It’ll happen when the hounds start barking with their...
Paul in South Bend, Indiana, notes that the French equivalent of the phrase have other fish to fry, meaning to have other things to do, is avoir d’autre chats a fouetter, or literally, to have other cats to whip. In Italian, a similarly creepy...
When two people can’t gee-haw together, it means they don’t get along. The terms gee-haw, or gee and haw, come from farming, where a trained animal obeys a command to go left or right–to gee or haw, in other words. Noncompliant...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski have a game matching people with their animal kingdom counterparts. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Animal Kingdom Counterparts Quiz” You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about...
Anne in Amherst, Massachusetts, remembers a family euphemism from her proper grandmother, born in 1869: instead of saying bull, she said the animal. That exact wording may have been her own, but the impulse fit a larger late-19th- and early-20th...