To feel poosly, or poosley, meaning to “feel poorly,” shows up in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York and is linked to Dutch settlement in the area. The word appears in a list of Dutchisms in the fourth edition of H. L. Mencken’s The American Language...
Do you refer to your dog or cat as “somebody”? As in: When you love somebody that much, you don’t mind if they slobber. In other words, is your pet a somebody or a something? Also, for centuries, there was little consistency in the...
At a South African boarding school, Rob picked up a phrase from Afrikaans that translates to land with your bum in the butter, meaning “to be lucky.” There are several variations in English — often with other words for “bum”, like...
The English language has a variety of expressions referring to the excretion of moisture from the skin due to heat. There’s the verb perspire and the Yiddish borrowing schvitz. If you perspire profusely, you may sweat buckets, or be sweating like a...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
Diamond dust, tapioca snow, and sugar icebergs — a 1955 glossary of arctic and subarctic terms describes the environment in ways that sound poetic. And a mom says her son is dating someone who’s non-binary. She supports their relationship, but...
