In Appalachia, if you ignore better choices before choosing a lesser one, such as a mate, you might be said to fly all over a daisy field and settle on a cow pile or flit like a butterfly from flower to flower and land on a cow crap. This is part of...
The names of professional sports teams often have surprising histories — like the baseball team name inspired by, of all things, trolley-car accidents. Plus, some questions to debate at your next barbecue: Is a hot dog a sandwich if it’s...
Pax, by Sara Pennypacker, follows a boy who raises a fox from the time it’s very young and then has to release it. Pennypacker spent time observing fox behavior and speaking with biologists about how foxes communicate, research that shapes the...
Hundreds of years ago, the word girl could refer to a child of either gender, and the word boy applied specifically to a servant. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a useful resource for understanding which terms were in...
Like the boy when the calf ran over him, “I had nothing to say,” is an old saying describing someone who’s speechless, and goes back to the mid-19th century. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Nothing to...
Ralston in Dallas, who was born in Jamaica and is the youngest of seven, asks about Jamaican English washbelly, the youngest child in a family. The word can carry a teasing sense of being spoiled or indulged, not merely young. It appears in Frederic...
