Rose in Lebanon, Virginia recalls a phrase passed down from her great-grandmother: The night before the first day of school, parents would come into the children’s bedroom and say in a singsong voice: School butter, school butter. This expression...
A Kentucky listener says her father often prefaced statements with the phrase I tell you what’s the truth. This regionalism appears in the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Bookshop|Amazon). A shorter version is I’ll tell you what, as you...
If you make a beeline for something, you’re taking the shortest route possible. You’re also mimicking bee-havior! After a bee has visited enough flowers to gather nectar, she flies straight back to the hive. And: Even a word like throttlebottom...
Samantha from Charleston, South Carolina, says her mother and grandmother are of Italian heritage, and have always advised keeping one’s neck warm as a precaution against the mal aria. That sort of consigli della nonna, or “Grandmother’s advice”...
Sean from Buffalo, New York, says that whenever someone burped, his mother would say Well, bring it up again and we’ll vote on it. There are many of these so-called wrongs of passage, such as Six more and we’ll have 7-Up! Another good one: Greetings...
How can you kick the verbal habit of saying you know and um so many times in a sentence? For one thing, get comfortable with pauses. There’s no need to fill every silence during a conversation. Also, a doctor who treats patients in Appalachia shares...