Have you ever offered to foster a dog or cat, but wound up adopting instead? There’s an alliterative term for that. And when you’re on the job, do niceties like “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” make you sound too...
The verb to kibitz has more than one meaning. It can mean “to chitchat” or “to look on giving unsolicited advice.” The word comes to English through Yiddish, and may derive from German Kiebitz, a reference to a folk belief...
“Whistling girls and cackling hens always come to some bad end,” said people in the olden days regarding transgressive women. A variation on this saying pops up in a 1911 book called Folk-Lore of Women by one Reverend Thomas Thiselton...
Someone should write a love letter to a new book called Letters of Note. It’s a splendid collection of all kinds of correspondence through the ages: Elvis Presley fans writing to the president, children making suggestions to famous...
If something pertains to a whole system or body, is it holistic or wholistic? Despite that tempting “w,” holistic is the correct term. It’s an example of folk etymology, the result of looking at the word whole and assuming that...
An old book of Virginia folk sayings contains such gems as “It’s as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth,” and “He can’t spell A-B-L-E.” This is part of a complete episode.