Mara, a student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo now studying at the University of North Alabama, thought Google Translate rendered the French for “peanut butter” as peanut leg. Instead of using it to translate the French word pâte, meaning...
If someone ever asks you how you are, you’re feeling on top of the world, you can say Alles in Butter (or im butter in some German dialects). It’s German for “Everything’s great” — literally, “All is in butter.” This is part of a complete episode...
A New York City listener recalls that as a youth in Erie, Pennsylvania, he and his peers referred to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a choke-and-slide or choke-n-slide. It’s a reference to the qualities of the sticky peanut butter and the...
When two people are walking side-by-side holding hands but briefly separate to go around an obstacle on opposite sites, they might say “bread and butter.” This phrase apparently stems from an old superstition that if the two people want to remain...
Sam Anderson, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, tweets the best sentence he reads each day, like this from D.H. Lawrence describing the affection of Italians: “They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips...
A Syracuse woman wonders how bread and butter pickles got their name. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Bread and Butter Pickles” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Allison Parker from Syracuse, New York, and I have a...
