Lola in Madison, Wisconsin, just bought a 1921 house that has a separate room beside the kitchen for a dishwashing sink and cupboards. She and her partner are unsure what to call it. The sink room, maybe? Yes! The name reflects the history of how...
Katie in East Thetford, Vermont, shares NICU slang from a neonatal intensive care unit, where a doorbell is an alarm summoning a team and a Giraffe is a brand-name bed that controls heat and humidity for an infant. The PANDA Room is the Preterm and...
Melanie in San Antonio, Texas, wonders about the use of the word pallet to mean improvised bedding on the floor. It goes back to a French term for it, paillet, which comes from a word meaning straw. The word also appears in some translations of the...
David from Trophy Club, Texas, wonders about the phrase “I wouldn’t kick them out of bed for eating crackers.” This jocular expression has been around since the early 1940s, and indicates that someone is so lovable they could do...
Clinomania and dysania are learned-sounding words for an all-too-familiar state: extreme difficulty getting out of bed. In clinomania, the clino- element traces to ancient words connected with leaning or lying down, the same idea heard in incline...
You might refer to those soft rolls of dust that collect under your bed as dust bunnies, dust kitties, or woolies, but in the Deep South they’re sometimes called house moss. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “House...