Why do we call our biceps guns? The slang lexicographer Jonathon Green suggests that the metaphor first pops up in baseball around the 1920s, when players referred to their throwing arms as guns. Believe it or not, the early baseball pitchers...
Word birth is Deb Roy’s term for the moment a child’s babble sharpens into a recognizable word. To study it, the MIT cognitive scientist and his wife wired their home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones, plus a privacy button, and recorded their...
Who is Cooter Brown? And just how high is he? His name appears in lots of phrases, including “high as Cooter Brown,” “drunk as Cooter Brown,” “dead as Cooter Brown,” “fast as Cooter Brown,” and “fertile as Cooter Brown.” The earliest known...
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...
quick-rinse n.— «Just what exactly is a “quick rinse” bankruptcy? Is it really a way to wash all that debt out of GM’s hair? Just take 30 days to untangle GM’s troubles? Coulter said he’d never even heard the term quick rinse until this morning...
drifting n.— «Sheriff’s Deputy Paul McRedmond says Kevin Enderlin was speeding in a car that crossed the centerline on a southeast Portland road and collided with a van. McRedmond says investigators believe Enderlin might have been drifting, which...