The Texas Folklore Society’s book The Best of Texas Folk and Folklore, 1916-1954 (Bookshop|Amazon) offers some wonderful browsing, including this saying to describe an environment that’s too loud: You can’t hear your ears in this place...
Thunderstorms might sound scary, but playful explanations for all those booms can help reassure little ones: How about the potato wagon’s rolling over the bridge? Or the angels are going bowling? Plus, if you just finished enjoying an...
There are lots of colloquial phrases to explain away the cacophony of a thunderstorm: The potato wagons are rolling, The tater wagon’s going over the bridge, The potato wagon broke down, and God is dumping out potatoes and washing them off. In...
What kind of book do people ask for most often in prison? Romance novels? No. The Bible? No. The most requested books by far are … dictionaries! A number of volunteer organizations gather and distribute used dictionaries to help inmates with...
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...
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...