Morgan from Los Angeles, California, has always used dingy (pronounced with a hard G, like dinghy) to describe that woozy, muddle-headed feeling that comes with being sick, a sense she picked up from her mother. Standard dictionaries offer entries...
Clabberhead is a mild rebuke that suggests someone has a curdled dairy product for brains, clabber being sour milk, ultimately from an Irish Gaelic term for “mud.” The Dictionary of American Regional English has a good history of clabberhead. In...
A North Carolina listener is curious about his meemaw’s use of a term meaning “food” that he heard as either jasmine or jassum. A dialectal term with various spellings that include jassum, jasum, and jazm can mean “gravy,” “sauce,” or even “juice...
A member of our Facebook group reports that her mother used to deride a privileged and expensively dressed woman with the phrase, Oh, she thinks she’s so katish! Used since the 1890s in the North Central part of the United States, katish or...
A bloodynoun or a bloodnoun isn’t a lesser-known part of speech. In the Southeastern United States, a bloodnoun is “a bullfrog.” This term is likely echoic, related to a similar term in the Gullah language. This is part of a...
Eva in Fairbanks, Alaska, wonders why her grandmother used to say raise the window down when she wanted someone to open that window. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Raise the Window Down” Hello, you have A Way with...
