In parts of Appalachia, if you’re buying gingerbread, you may not literally be buying a baked good. In Our Appalachia (Bookshop|Amazon), an oral history of the region, editors Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg describe an old political...
Logan in Frankfort, Kentucky, says when he was growing up in the southeastern part of the state, he’d hear people using the word wasper for the insect most people call a wasp. This dialectal variant is common in Appalachia, along with wast and...
Ian in Clyde, North Carolina, is puzzled when a colleague uses the term blue million, meaning “a large amount.” Along with words like zillion and gazillion, this expression functions as an indefinite hyperbolic numeral. Sometimes the...
Scared water is a wonderfully sharp expression for coffee that’s much too weak. It works as a complaint all by itself, as in, “Don’t give me any of that scared water.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of ““Scared Water” Is Really...
Betsy in Murray, Kentucky, used Quit your mulligrubbing during a card game, meaning quit complaining or bellyaching. Mulligrub is an old one: by the 1500s it could mean a gloomy mood, while to have the mulligrubs could refer to a stomachache or...
What do we mean by the expression for a spell, meaning “for a period of time”? It’s mere coincidence that this term is written the same way as the word spell meaning to “arrange letters to form words” or spell as in...