When Melissa was growing up in Tacoma, Washington, she’d walk to the corner store, where she’d pick up a corn dog and a bag of jo jos, a term for soft potato wedges with the skin left on. Researcher Barry Popik has dug up a story that...
If you’re taking the dog for a walk, be sure to talk along a plastic bag to pick up any barker’s eggs. This is part of a complete episode.
Jo Ann lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, but grew up in England. She remembers that when her brother was mopey during family trips to visit their grandparents in Devon, their grandfather would tell him “Get that black dog off your back...
Paul in South Bend, Indiana, notes that the French equivalent of the phrase have other fish to fry, meaning to have other things to do, is avoir d’autre chats a fouetter, or literally, to have other cats to whip. In Italian, a similarly creepy...
To bark at a knot means to engage in foolish or futile activity, like a dog yapping at a knothole on a tree. This is part of a complete episode.
How often do you hear the words campaign and political in the same breath? Oddly enough, 19th-century grammarians railed against using campaign to mean “an electoral contest.” Martha and Grant discuss why. And, lost in translation: a...