We dish about the many terms for “gossip,” including hot tea, scuttlebutt, the scoop, the 411, the lowdown, the dirt, the scoop, hot goss, the poop, the dope, the T. In prison slang, grapes means “gossip,” and particularly...
Andrew from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, recalls a phrase his grandmother used: You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die. A peck is a unit of dry measure equal to a quarter of a bushel. Peck is also a term of approximate measure, as in to...
Colin in West Hartford, Connecticut, says his teenagers admiringly use the word dirty to describe a great athlete, and use filthy to describe one who’s especially talented. Although this positive usage of originally negative words may sound...
David from Dallas, Texas, grew up hearing his great-aunt use gradoo for a bit of grime, schmutz, or crud. His family assumed it was a family invention, but the word, also spelled gradu, turns up across the South and in scattered spots like...
Wrapping up 2016 with words from the past year and some newsy limericks. Bigly and Brexit were on lots of lips this year, as well as an increasingly popular Danish word that means “cozy.” Also, Quiz Guy John Chaneski sums up the year in...
Leslie in Fort Laramie, Wyoming, grew up in western Nebraska hearing the roadside ditch beside a raised road called a borrow pit, especially in a construction family. That form is real regional usage, found more often in the West and around...