Home » Fashioned

TagFashioned

Baseball Slang from 1907

Hey kid, hey kid, give ’em the saliva toss, the perspiration pellet, the damp fling, deluded dip, the good ol’ fashioned spitball! An essay on baseball slang from 1907 sent Martha off on a search for more of these wet ones. This is part...

Dictionary Recommendations

Grant and Martha recommend dictionaries for college students, both online references (OneLook.com, The Oxford English Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary) and the old-fashioned kind to keep at one’s elbow (Shorter Oxford English...

Wreck of the Hesperus

“You look like the wreck of the Hesperus!” It means you look “disheveled, ragged, dirty, hung over, or otherwise less than your best.” It may sound like an odd phrase, but it made perfect sense to generations of...

Newlywed Hazing Shivaree

One definition of a shivaree is “a compliment extended to every married couple made up of beating tin pans, blowing horns, ringing cowbells, playing horse fiddles, caterwauling, and in fine, the use of every disagreeable sound to make the...

Good Night, Nurse

Some folks use the old-fashioned exclamation “Good night, nurse!” as a handy substitute for a cussword. But where’d it come from? Grant explains how this phrase became popular in the early 20th century. This is part of a complete...

Old-Fashioned Riddles

Martha tries out a couple of old-fashioned riddles on Grant. Here’s one: “What goes around the world, but stays in a corner?” This is part of a complete episode.

Recent posts