The English language has a variety of expressions referring to the excretion of moisture from the skin due to heat. There’s the verb perspire and the Yiddish borrowing schvitz. If you perspire profusely, you may sweat buckets, or be sweating like a...
Peigner la girafe, literally to comb the giraffe, is French for being stuck with a tedious, useless, or annoying task. Canadian author Mark Abley includes it in Watch Your Tongue: What Our Everyday Sayings and Idioms Figuratively Mean., along with a...
Carrot and stick originally meant reward plus punishment, not a carrot forever dangling from the same stick. Steve in Dennis, Massachusetts, asks about the familiar cartoon of a donkey chasing a carrot tied just out of reach, but the older...
If you need proof that language is powerful, here’s some. Researchers at Cornell recently reported that kids are more likely to eat their veggies if they’re told the food has enticing names like “X-ray Vision Carrots” and...
grub up v. phr.— «Under a scheme to start in August 2008, if EU agriculture ministers agree, subsidies to uproot vineyards—or “grub up,” in EU parlance—would fall gradually each year in a carrot-and-stick approach to promote...
carrot-cruncher n.— «Carrot-munchers 1; global confectionery giant 0. For millions of people around the world, Sunday’s climbdown by the makers of Mars Bars was a particularly sweet success. I use the term “carrot-munchers”...
