In their article “My Mother, Whenever She passed Away, She Had Pneumonia: The History and Functions of whenever,” Michael Montgomery and John Kirk discuss the “punctual” whenever, a vestige of Scots-Irish usage heard in much...
Omar in Wilmington, North Carolina, says that when he was growing up in Pakistan, he and fellow cricket players referred to their team captain as the skipper. The term skipper, or skip, originated in seafaring terminology and now applies to the...
Barker’s egg is Australian slang for the dog poop you scoop up on a walk. The joke treats the barker, the dog, as if it had laid an egg, with a plastic bag standing by for the usual cleanup. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
How windy is it? Ask in Australia and, you might get a snarky answer that involves a description of a hen trying hard to lay an egg. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “How Windy is it in Australia?” Next time somebody...
Growing up in Massachusetts, David always used the word bubbler to denote a drinking fountain. So he was flabbergasted during a trip to Southern Indiana when no one had any idea what he meant when he asked where he could find a bubbler. He might not...
In several previous episodes, we’ve talked about pangrams, those sentences that use every letter of the alphabet at least once. Lauren, who lives in Perth, Western Australia, sent us a couple penned by her 11-year-old daughter Sinead...