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Seen the Elephant and Heard the Owl

Christine in Santa Cruz, California, says her well-traveled father always used the phrase I’ve seen the elephant and heard the owl to mean “I’m not easily deceived” or “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes.”...

Traffic Neckdown

Like Bott’s dots and cat’s eyes, the word neckdown comes from the language of traffic flow regulation. A neckdown is an extension of a curb that widens the path for pedestrians and slows moving vehicles. Also called curb extensions, bulb...

Episode 1414

Above Your Raisin’

There’s a new kind of hamburger menu that involves pixels, not pickles. It’s that little stack of horizontal lines in the corner of a webpage that you click to see more options. You might use a hamburger menu while webrooming–that...

Black Elephants

Environmentalists have combined black swan with white elephant to form the term black elephant, meaning “something likely to happen that will have a detrimental impact.” This is part of a complete episode.

See the Elephant

If you’ve “seen the elephant,” it means you’ve been in combat. But why an elephant? Martha and Grant also discuss some odd idioms in Spanish, including one that translates as “your bowtie is whistling.” And what...

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