A question from a listener on the A Way with Words Facebook page has Martha musing about the entomological and etymological connections between the word pupil and the pupal stage of an insect’s life.
A listener from Richmond, Virginia, remembers an old game called buckeye that consists of metaphorically pulling someone’s leg, then calling Buckeye! and tugging one’s own lower eyelid. Martha suggests that it may be related to a 19th-century use of...
They say it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an autocorrected text message to be, well, correct. Listeners like Arnold share their funny autocorrected text messages. And by Arnold, we of course mean Brooke. This is...
What do you call the crust that forms in the corners of your eyes when you sleep? Sleepy dust, sleepy sand, eyejam, eye boogers, eye potatoes, sleep sugar, eye crusties, sleepyjacks. An Indiana man wonders if anyone else uses his family’s term for...
A woman says that when playing hide-and-seek with a small child, her mother-in-law says “peep-eye!” instead of “peekaboo!” Is that usage limited to certain parts of the country? And where do they say “pee-bo!”? This is part of a complete episode...
When someone’s fast asleep, a Texan might say that he’s “out like Lottie’s eye.” But who’s Lottie and what happened to her eye? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Out Like Lottie’s Eye” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is...