Our conversation about slang terms for traveling by foot prompted an email from Tom in Canton, Texas, who reports that while living in Israel, he used to hear fellow high school students say in Arabic that they were taking bus number 11, the long...
When you say, “I’ll get a ride with Pat and Charlie” or “I’m going to go with Pat and Charlie,” you’re talking about walking somewhere. Other colloquial ways to describe traveling on foot include getting...
In the American South, you might indicate you’re going to walk instead of drive with the expression, “I’m going to take my foot in hand and walk.” A variation is “I’m going to take my foot in my hand.”...
It’s hard enough to get a new word into the dictionary. But what happens when lawmakers get involved? New Jersey legislators passed a resolution as part of an anti-bullying campaign urging dictionary companies to adopt the word upstander. It...
A listener from California says her family’s way of remarking on rain is to mention the space between falling drops. So a 12-inch rain means there’s about a foot between one drop and the next. Tricky, huh? This is part of a complete episode.
We say we “foot the bill” when we pay for something simply because when you’re totalling up figures on an account ledger, the total comes at the bottom of the sheet— or, the foot. This is part of a complete episode.