An Arkansas listener is puzzled when a neighbor notes that the weather turned off cold. This expression is part of a long-standing American dialect tradition that includes come off cold, come off hot, or turned off pretty. Such phrases show up...
Whippoorwills, bob whites, and chickadees. How do we decide the names of birds and what to call their calls? Plus, the last syllables of Arkansas and Kansas are pronounced differently, but they come from the same etymological root. And: What’s the...
The last syllables of Arkansas and Kansas don’t rhyme, but both come from the language of the same Sioux tribe. The name of Kansas was adopted by English-speaking people who came to that area, while the name of Arkansas came from those who were...
Greg in Mena, Arkansas, says that when he was learning to be a professional pilot, one of his instructors would say, You thought like Nelly if someone had thought they were doing something correctly, but failed to. Although the phrase is not that...
When Kentrell from West Memphis, Arkansas, worked for a granite company, his co-workers who were about to put two pieces of granite together would say I’m going to pull a seam. But why would they use the word pull for the action of pushing together...
Old Edward’s sayings or Old Edderd’s sayings are homespun bits of wisdom that were dispensed on the radio show Lum and Abner. The show, which ran from 1931 to 1955, featured the fictional characters of Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody, who worked at...