Jackie from Hinsdale, Illinois, grew up hearing a teasing child described as a corker — playful, rambunctious, and only mildly naughty. The word’s slang sense developed from cork as something that stops or settles matters or ends a debate or...
Josh in Binghamton, New York, wonders about the slang term beefed it, meaning to “took a hard fall.” It’s probably connected to biff, often used in snowboarding and mountain biking, meaning “to fail” or “do badly...
A listener shares his youthful experience of misunderstanding the rules of baseball and what it means to run home, and Martha confesses to a similar goof as a junior-high-school-age basketball player. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...
Paul from Omaha, Nebraska, says as a result of watching the College World Series in that city, he and his son wondered when sports announcers started using the word cheese to describe a pitcher’s fastball, and such variants as throwing cheese...
Bud in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says when he was fishing but no one was catching anything, an acquaintance observed, We must be holding our mouths wrong. There are several versions of that expression, including You must be holding your mouth wrong or...
Deadpan, an adjective for a flat, unsmiling affect, as in deadpan humor, comes from pan as slang for “face.” By the early 1900s pan could mean the human face, so a deadpan was a face with nothing happening on it. Early uses of deadpan show up in...