Nell from Virginia Beach, Virginia, remembers her great-grandfather and her grandmother using the phrase as clean as seven waters to mean “spotlessly clean.” The word waters in this case is analogous to washes or rinses, so being cleaned with seven...
Paul from Omaha, Nebraska, says as a result of watching the College World Series in that city, he and his son wondered when sports announcers started using the word cheese to describe a pitcher’s fastball, and such variants as throwing cheese, hard...
“May a mouse eat you,” or in Persian, moosh bokharadet, is a term of endearment suggesting the recipient is small and cute. Another picturesque hypocorism: French mon petit chou, “sweetheart,” but literally, “my little cabbage.” This is part of a...
First-century graffiti. People in ancient times could be just as bawdy and colorful as we are today. To prove it, we found some graffiti written on the walls in the city of Pompeii, and found plenty of sex, arrogance and good old fashioned bathroom...
A listener whose first language is Farsi wonders if the name of the grandma in the classic film An Affair to Remember, gave us the endearment nanu, for grandmother. In Mediterranean countries, words like nanu, nana, nene and nona are all common...
Why call it a doggy bag when it’s really for your husband? Grant and Martha talk about the language of leftovers and why we eat beef and not cow. And how old is the typical public-library patron? Plus, in Afghanistan, proverbs are part of everyday...
