Victor, a film noir fan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says closed captioning has made him newly aware of dialogue he’d previously missed. Watching The Maltese Falcon, for example, he ran into the phrase crackin’ foxy. The crack is the same crack as...
Matthew in Cincinnati, Ohio, says his grandfather used to refer to his car as the machine. Around the turn of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to apply the term machine to automobiles. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
In the Private Voices corpus of American Civil War letters, the term pill is often used to mean bullet, although this slang term is at least a century older. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Pill Meant Bullet” One term...
