Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one...
A listener in Virginia Beach, Virginia, reports that her three-year-old would ask for horrible eggs rather than hard boiled eggs, and the family has used that term ever since. A listener in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, says her Cuban-born mother...
A listener who grew up in Ukraine recalls that her family always referred to chicken drumsticks by a name that translates as Bush’s legs. This jocular term refers to an agreement between U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail...
Five guys walk into a diner. One orders a toad in the hole, another the gashouse eggs, the third gets eggs in a basket, the next orders a hole in one, and the last fellow gets spit in the ocean. What does each wind up with? The same thing! Although...
What does the expression egg on have to do with chickens? Nothing, actually. Martha explains why, and tells the story of how the term curate’s egg came to mean “something with both good and bad characteristics.”