Martha’s fond of videos about Appalachian dialect, and in one she came across the expression, “I’d just as soon be in hell with my back broke,” meaning “I strongly prefer to be anywhere else.” This is part of a...
The “burning platform” is a trendy phrase in business at the moment, used for a crisis that demands immediate action. It refers to a guy on an oil rig that caught fire, and he had the choice of staying on the rig and facing certain...
What is a buster? As TLC sang, “A scrub is a guy who thinks he’s fly, also known as a buster.” That is, a buster is that guy on the fringe who’s always putting on airs. The word may come from the old term gangbusters, which...
What is a bingo? If you’re a taxi driver, a bingo is someone you don’t pick up because your cab is already occupied. Another bit of cabbie slang is bunco. That’s when they are called to a specific address but no passenger shows up...
Sarah from Los Angeles, California, asks whether ogle should sound like oh-gle, oggle, or oogle. The standard pronunciation is oh-gle, rhyming with “mogul,” while some dictionaries recognize a much rarer variant closer to oggle. The form oogle is...
If you cut something to the quick, it means you’re getting at its very essence. It comes from the Old English word cwicu, meaning alive. It’s the source of the quick in the phrase the quick and the dead, as well as the words quicksilver (“living...