The German idiom Du gehst mir auf den Keks means “You’re annoying me” or “you’re getting on my nerves.” The literal translation? “You go me on the cookie” or “You’re walking on my cookie.” This makes more sense in German because “cookie” is slang...
A Kentuckian says he always described gunning a car’s engine to make the vehicle spin in a circle as cutting doughnuts or cutting donuts, but when visiting South Dakota, he heard the same thing described as spinning cookies. This pastime goes by...
When a term paper is due in 24 hours, there’s no better tactic than to break open the Milano cookies and procrastineat. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Procrastineat” Here is a bit of college slang that I’m absolutely adopting...
Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska feeds us a game of spoonerisms, or rhyming phrase pairs where the first sounds are swapped. For example, what do a stream of information in 140 characters and a better-tailored suit have in common? Or how about a Michael...
We got a call from Sarah in Dresden, Germany, who’s applying to work for the State Department as foreign service officer. She was curious about an article that contained the term pinstriped cookie-pusher. According to William Safire’s Political...
What is a cucoloris? This lighting grate, which also goes by such names as cookie, gobo, and dapple sheet, is used in photography to cast a dramatic shadow. There are lots of spellings of this word, including cuculoris, kookaloris, cookaloris, and...