A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...
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 word blue...
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 “a magical incantation.” The...
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...
A listener calling from the public library in Chowan County, North Carolina, says her father used the word kyarn to describe something unpleasant or repulsive, as in describing something that isn’t worth a kyarn or stinks like kyarn. Also spelled...
Scrabblepoor means “extremely poor,” conjuring the image of farmers having to scrape together a living by literally scratching at the dirt. The word hardscrabble is more commonly used to describe such grinding poverty. This is part of a complete...
