There are lots of colloquial phrases to explain away the cacophony of a thunderstorm: The potato wagons are rolling, The tater wagon’s going over the bridge, The potato wagon broke down, and God is dumping out potatoes and washing them off. In...
Corey in Buffalo, New York, says her family uses the word unta for “the piece of bread you use to sop up the last bite of what you’re eating.” They also use it as a verb, as in I’m going to unta. Her family is half Sephardic...
A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...
Samantha, a Latin teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio, is curious about why some people say bread and butter after two people walking together pass by on either side of an object in their path or try to avoid being split. (An example occurs in a 1960...
Our list of words for stingy people just grew longer, thanks to a contribution from Rick in San Antonio, Texas: When he lived in Brazil, he learned the expression mão-de-vaca, literally “hand of a cow” and pão-duro, literally “hard...
What do you call the end of a loaf of bread? There are lots of terms for that last piece, including heel, bread butt, the outsider, the nose, bunce, tumpee, skalk, krunka, or in Spanish codo, meaning “elbow.” Sue in Singer’s Glen...