Dan from Jacksonville, Florida, grew up in south Louisiana, where speakers of Cajun French say garde de donc! to mean “Well, would you look at that!” or “Can you believe this?” The phrase is used to point out something...
Jennifer, a tutor in Tallahassee, Florida, wonders what to call a segment of an orange. Among botanists, it’s a carpel. Informally, it’s a segment, slice, wedge, peg, or pig. It may be that these segments are called pigs, because all...
Patrick in Jacksonville, Florida, is curious about an expression his family uses: just like downtown, meaning, “done really well,” or “performed to perfection.” This phrase, along with just like New York, originated in the...
Byron in Jacksonville, Florida, shares that when his mother was astonished, she’d say Don’t that beat all! But when really surprised, she’d exclaim, That beats bobtail and bobtail beats the devil! What’s a bobtail and how...
Michelle in Pembroke Pines, Florida wonders why performers wish each other luck with the admonition Break a leg! This practice of wishing the opposite of what you really mean appears across a wide range of theatrical traditions. German performers...
While in a cooking class in Mexico, Travis from Orlando, Florida, was told by the instructor that the word quesadilla comes a supposed Nahuatl word, quesaditzen. That’s not the case, although many other food words derive from that indigenous...