Molly in San Diego grew up hearing her mother say someone daydreaming was in a brown study. The phrase goes back in English to the 1500s and means deep in thought, often with a gloomy or melancholy cast. Here brown reflects an older sense of dark or...
Pam in Eureka, California, says that when her mother and grandmother would enter a particularly dark room, they’d remark that it was dark as the inside of a goat. Mark Twain used the phrase dark as the inside of a cow in his book Roughing It...
The Spanish expression dar a luz literally means to give to the light, and it’s the usual way to say to give birth. A woman in labor may be described as alumbrando, from the same luminous family of words, with the image of a baby moving from...
The expression “dark as Egypt” means really dark, and is a reference to the story in the book of Exodus of the ten plagues that descended upon Egypt, the ninth of these being complete darkness. This is part of a complete episode...
There’s an old children’s ditty that goes, “Mama had a baby and its head popped off,” which you sing while popping the top off of a dandelion or similar flower. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Its Head...
