Saul, a law enforcement officer in San Diego, wonders how pig became an insult for police, along with offshoots like bacon. The police sense shows up by the early 1800s, growing out of an older use of pig for someone seen as disagreeable, greedy, or...
Tom in Indianapolis, Indiana, remembers hearing Irish pennant in the Marine Corps for a loose thread hanging from a uniform. The term belongs to the category of ethnophaulism, or ethnic slur, alongside expressions such as Irish screwdriver for...
Emily in Fort Worth, Texas, asks why a peanut is called goober, and why her sister uses the same word for homemade peanut butter and jelly swirled together. Goober comes from African languages, apparently including Bantu languages of Central and...
In today’s schools, mean girls might dismiss a classmate who wears Ugg boots, drinks sugary lattes, and listens to Top 40 radio as basic. This adjective for a slightly vapid, mainstream trend-follower first showed up in hip-hop lyrics around...
Is Hoosier a derogatory term? People from Indiana proudly embrace it, but in the dialect island that is the St. Louis area, the word means someone who is uncouth or uncultured. In Southern Appalachia, the related words hoodger, and hoojer still...
A San Diego listener of Mexican descent says a scene in a Quentin Tarantino film has her wondering about the term Mexican standoff. Is it just a duel? A three-way duel, complete with guns? The end of a 1-1 doubleheader in baseball? Over time...
