Holly from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, remembers her grandmother loading family dinners with pepper and saying they wouldn’t get the pip. The pepper appears to be a folk-remedy flourish, not part of the word’s origin. The pip, also the pips, has...
What’s an asafidity bag? Variously spelled asfidity, asfedity, asafetida, asphidity, and assafedity, it’s a folk medicine tradition involves putting the stinky resin of the asafetida or asafoetida plant in a small bag worn around the neck to ward...
Why do spelling bees include such bizarre, obsolete words as cymotrichous? Why is New York called the Big Apple? Also, the stinky folk medicine tradition called an asifidity bag, the surprising number of common English phrases that come directly...
