Gabrielle in Beloit, Michigan, asks why the closure on trousers is called a fly when the word more commonly names an insect or the act of moving through the air. In clothing, fly first meant the overlapping cloth flap that covers the opening, not...
Kathleen from Ithaca, New York, remembers her mother saying Go fry ice! meaning “Bug off!” It’s probably a minced oath replacing a phrase that exhorts the hearer to go do something else that starts with F. The earliest known...
Wrapping up 2016 with words from the past year and some newsy limericks. Bigly and Brexit were on lots of lips this year, as well as an increasingly popular Danish word that means “cozy.” Also, Quiz Guy John Chaneski sums up the year in...
Flee Fly Flo is a camp song, and like other songs passed along orally, it has lots of variations, and often includes rhythmic hand-clapping. In her book Camp Songs, Folk Songs, Patricia Averill suggests the roots of this camp favorite may be in scat...
A woman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, say that there, if someone’s fly is open, instead of saying “XYZ” for “examine your zipper,” many people say “Kennywood is open.” Kennywood, it turns out, is a nearby amusement park. This is part of a complete...
The slang phrase XYZ, meaning “examine your zipper,” has been used since at least the 1960s as a subtle tipoff to let someone know his zipper is down. A variant, XYZ PDQ, means “examine your zipper pretty darn quick.” Other surreptitious suggestions...