An Alabama listener says her grandmother would express astonishment with the phrase They! My goodness! This exclamation, which is common in her grandmother’s native Appalachia, is probably an R-less pronunciation of There! as in Look there...
A man who moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, was puzzled when he offered one of his new neighbors a refill on her beverage. She said “I wouldn’t care to have any,” which he understood to be a refusal. What she meant was that she did...
Gifts for book lovers: Martha recommends one for lovers of libraries and another for students of Spanish. Grant suggests some enchanting novels for young readers. When it comes to books, though, you can’t always judge them by their original...
A caller from East Tennessee swears that he’s heard ducks imitating the sounds of some nearby geese, and he’s probably right. Animals do indeed have the ability to mimic the sounds and behaviors of other species, but that doesn’t...
Would you rather live in a world with no adjectives … or no verbs — and why? Also, who in the world is that director Alan Smithee [SMITH-ee] who made decades’ of crummy films? Turns out that if a movie director has his work wrested away...
Jane in Elk Park, North Carolina, grew up hearing her great-uncle say a misbehaving child was cutting a head shine—pulling some caper or carrying on in a noisy, comic way. The expression likely combines shine, used since at least the 1830s for a...