How could you stop reading after a novel that begins like this? I had this story from one who had no business to tell me, or to any other. That’s the first line of Tarzan of the Apes (Bookshop|Amazon) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This is part of a...
Fans of the popular British baking show know that you don’t want your many-layered cake to concertina, or “collapse like an accordion.” The verb concertina, in this sense, derives from the name of an accordion-like instrument. This...
Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif once observed that “The duty of the writer…is to remind us that we will die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is part of a complete episode.
There are lots of colloquial phrases to explain away the cacophony of a thunderstorm: The potato wagons are rolling, The tater wagon’s going over the bridge, The potato wagon broke down, and God is dumping out potatoes and washing them off. In...
James in Charlotte, North Carolina, notes that when discussing a newborn baby, he’s heard people say something that sounded like, “That baby ‘woh’ seven pounds, two ounces.” He’s never heard that usage before. The...
A listener named Tami contacted the show by WhatsApp to say that whenever someone would be talking about a subject that nobody else knew anything about, her father-in-law would respond with I had one of those, but the wheels came off. This is part...