You have 30 cows and 28 chickens. How many didn’t? The answer is 10, because 28 can be heard as twenty ate, making the setup mean that twenty cows ate the chickens. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Answer to the “30 Cows...
Crack of chicken is Elizabeth in Dallas’s phrase for an absurdly early hour, a playful mashup of crack of dawn and rooster-or-chicken expressions such as when the cock crows, up with the chickens, and go to bed with the chickens. The variant crack...
Latvian vista means chicken, a tidy example of a false friend, a word that looks familiar in another language but means something else. Carlos says his Latvian family background makes phrases such as Vista Computing Systems, Vista Vision, and Vista...
chicken riggies n.pl.— «I asked her about a shirt I’d seen in the gift shop that listed something called “chicken riggies” as one of Utica’s claims to fame. She explained that it was a pasta dish—chicken and rigatoni.» —“Beer, There...
Why are the names of cars so unimaginative? Grant argues that auto manufacturers might take inspiration from ornithology to build a better car name. (Then again, would you be any less aggravated if you were rear-ended by a lazuli bunting?) Also this...
What does the expression egg on have to do with chickens? Nothing, actually. Martha explains why, and tells the story of how the term curate’s egg came to mean “something with both good and bad characteristics.”