Finnie, as in I finnie that, is an old expression used to claim something. The term may have arisen from the use of the word fen in the children’s game of marbles, referring to the idea of the fending or making up a rule that defends an action or...
English spelling seems so irregular because it preserves history instead of matching sound. Early on, this Germanic tongue absorbed Norse and French influences from invaders, and in the late 1400s, printing helped standardize early spellings just...
When a teenager went a week without talking as part of a school project, he noticed a surprising side effect: Instead of rehearsing a response to what other people were saying to him, he was focused on listening — and feeling smarter as a result...
Why is boxing called the sweet science when it’s obviously such a bruising sport? Also, a mother of five is baffled when her Gen Z kids use words she thought she knew. For example, they call sweatshirts sweaters, and declare that’s so aesthetic...
Do you refer to nighttime sleepwear as jammies, jommies, or something else? A Nashville, Tennessee, woman says that her family referred to pajamas as jommies, while her husband’s family always called them jammies. Although jammies is the far more...
To shammick means to “amble about slowly or lounge around.” Most often heard in Appalachia, this verb is also spelled shummick. Writer Horace Kephart defined it this way: “to shuffle about, idly nosing into things, as a bear does when there is...