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 and half Ashkenazi, and...
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 bread.” The...
Eileen remembers a nursing-home resident who liked her tea barefoot, meaning without milk or sugar. The slang use goes back at least to the mid-19th century and can also describe plain coffee or liquor taken straight, with evidence from English...
On our Facebook group, listeners discuss jocular explanations for air holes in bread, such as That’s where the baker jumped through, and That’s where the baker crawled through, and for a really big hole, That’s where the baker and his wife jumped...
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, Virginia, calls it...
A listener in San Antonio, Texas, has fond memories of chocolate gravy over biscuits, the word gravy in this sense having nothing to do with a meat-based sauce. Grant shares his mother’s own recipe, which she calls cocoa gravy. This is part of a...
