“Well, Butter My Buns and call me a biscuit!” Martha and Grant talk about great catch phrases from old-time radio comedies. Also, why do we speak of a meteoric rise? Don’t meteors plummet? What do you keep in a Fibber McGee drawer...
News reports that the makers of Scrabble were changing the rules to allow proper names left some purists fuming. The rumors were false, but they got Grant thinking about idiosyncratic adaptations of the game’s rules. Also this week, the...
Bow chicka wow wow is the joking riff that signals a sexual double entendre, and a cleaner echo is brown chicken, brown cow. The phrase mimics the same rhythm and shows up in Trace Adkins’s country song Brown Chicken, Brown Cow, with a video full of...
Well, shut my mouth and call me Shirley! Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! Kurt in Grand Rapids shares several of these humorous imperatives. The roots of this snowclone, a reusable phrase template of the form do X to me and call me Y, probably...
“Imitation is the sincerest form of television,” said the radio comedian Fred Allen. Listeners are invited to share their favorite modern proverbs like this one, as well as their favorite classics. This is part of a complete episode...
She's a pickin' and he's a grinnin'--it's another newsletter from "A Way with Words." Salut! Oh, hey, sure, it was a rerun this past weekend. A good one, though, with a brand-new word quiz to boot. It has...