Are there words and phrases that you misunderstood for an embarrassingly long time? Maybe you thought that money laundering literally meant washing drug-laced dollar bills, or that AM radio stations only broadcast in the morning? • A moving new...
Rebecca from San Diego, California, wants to know the origin of the verb to bogart, as in “Don’t bogart that salad dressing!” meaning “don’t hog it” or “don’t use it all up.” The slang comes from the tough-guy screen persona of Humphrey Bogart, not...
At SUNY Potsdam and North Country Public Radio, Grant Barrett collected slang, regionalisms, and family expressions on index cards, about 160 terms in all. Examples include crick, a northern regional pronunciation of creek, and bogue or boag, slang...
Has the age of email led to an outbreak of exclamation marks? Do women use them more than men? Also, is there a word for the odd feeling when you listen to a radio personality for years, then discover that they look nothing like your mental picture...
Bogart, meaning to hog or monopolize something, does trace back to actor Humphrey Bogart. The verb first meant to bully or intimidate, as in forcing your way into a club, and dates to about the 1950s. By the late 1960s it had shifted toward taking...