Van from Washington, D.C., is curious about the word fluffle, which supposedly denotes “a group of bunnies.” A friend of hers claimed to have coined this collective noun for lagomorphs along with friends at the University of Alberta in...
Brian in Dallas, Texas, wants to know the origin of the skinny as in “all the details and information.” This expression may go all the way back to slang used at the U.S. Naval Academy in the early 1900s. This is part of a complete...
The 5-Minute Linguist is a book of short, accessible essays by linguists who answer the questions they commonly hear from laypersons. For example, what’s the difference between a language and a dialect? What causes someone to have a...
The mouthful supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is often associated with the song by the same name in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins. But versions of this word were around for decades, including in a 1949 song called...
The phrase “You’re not the boss of me” may have been popularized by the They Might Be Giants song that serves as the theme for TV’s “Malcolm in the Middle.” But this turn of phrase goes back to at least 1883. This...
Sam in Burlington, Vermont, wondered whether fraught can stand alone, as in This situation is fraught, after years of hearing fraught with peril or fraught with worry. The word is related to freight and originally had to do with loading a ship, then...