Don’t move my cheese! It’s a phrase middle managers use to talk about adapting to change in the workplace. Plus, the origin story of the name William, and why it’s Guillermo in Spanish. And a five-year-old poses a question that puzzles a lot of...
Mehran of San Antonio, who grew up in Iran, notes that in Farsi, khaki means earthy or down-to-earth. English got the word through British military use in South Asia. By the 1840s, soldiers in northern India or what is now Pakistan were wearing a...
A listener in Buford, Georgia, says his mother’s maiden name was Barnett, and reports that he was told that the addition of an “e” to a last name was once an indication that the person was descended from slave families. This is part of a complete...
brown-bag v. to illegally sell proprietary seed varieties. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
brown-bagging v.— «“Brown-bag” sales—a reference to farmers’ rudimentary packaging—are prompting big seed companies to drop expensive research programs and thus give foreign competitors an advantage, the industry claims. Pioneer Hi-Bred...
brown-bag v.— «On the farm, brown-bagging is the practice of selling harvested, government-protected varieties of seed to other farmers for future planting at discount prices. On Wednesday, in an 8-1 victory for the nation’s seed industry, the...