Vicki in Appleton, Wisconsin, grew up outside Minneapolis using kype (also rendered as cipe or kipe) for taking something that wasn’t really yours but didn’t seem important to the adults in charge, such as fort-building materials, with the...
How do you pronounce the word llama? A caller who learned in school that Spanish “ll” is pronounced like English “y” thinks it’s a mistake to pronounce this animal’s name as LAH-ma. Is he correct? This is part of...
Bruce in Indianapolis heard older Indiana farm folks use work-brickle for someone who’s industrious, or, in the negative, not much of a worker. The expression goes back to dialects of the British Isles and survives in U.S. pockets with shifting...
Dan from San Diego asks about sass in don’t sass me, a line he heard on Two and a Half Men. Sass is a dialect pronunciation of sauce, which developed a figurative sense of sting, bite, or zest added to speech, much as a sauce adds flavor to food...
Why do some people pronounce the word wash as “warsh”? Martha and Grant discuss the so-called “intrusive R” and why it makes people say “warsh” instead of “wash” and “Warshington” instead...
Time for another linguistic mystery. Where would you be if you decided to go twacking around duckish, and then you came home and wrote about it in a scribbler?