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...
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 Say” I came across an...
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...
in-law chaser n.— «It was a warm summer day in June, and the sky was clear except for a small group of clouds running across the flatlands away from them, it was a quick moving summer storm. They could see the mist of rain falling to the ground...
butt hutt n.— «Some boys end up in unsupervised group rentals they call “butt huts” because of the crowded sleeping, while others live in cars or end up in jail.» —“Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find Help” by Erik Eckholm in St. George, Utah New...
