Ryan, a wildland firefighter from Asheville, North Carolina, asked about bagger, a derogatory term for “a lazy or amateur firefighter.” The term likely comes from military slang, where bagger is short for dirtbagger or S-bagger, most likely deriving...
The word budget derives from French bougette, “leather bag.” An old phrase in English to open one’s budget, meant “to speak one’s mind.” The word purse is related to French bourse, a word for the stock market. This is part of a complete episode...
A caller who grew up in Wisconsin says his spouse, who’s from Florida, teases him for such things as pronouncing bagel like “BEG-el” and dagger as “DEG-ger.” They’re just products of his isolect, the regional variants from his particular dialect of...
Why do we describe someone or something very special as all that and a bag of chips? It’s an intensifier of the expression all that and appears to have been popularized by a 1991 newspaper story about new slang, playing off the earlier...
Elsie from Fredericksburg, Texas, wonders if a gunnysack and a burlap bag are the same thing. Both are made from coarse fabric, but the word gunnysack is actually redundant, because the gunny goes back to a Sanskrit word that means “sack.” Tow sack...
Tim from Manhattan Beach, California, says his grandmother used to carry a brown paper bag and call it her poke sack. The word poke, in this case, means bag, making poke sack a pleonasm, which is an expression using more words than necessary to...
