Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit? And what’s a busman’s holiday? Martha and Grant talk about bumbershoots, brollies, nursery rhymes, and alternatives to the word unicycle. Plus, an app-inspired quiz, favorite...
There’s another brand-new episode for you to catch up on, in which we talk about “sonker” (a kind of fruit cobbler), suss (is it British?), roly-polies (a bug which by any other name would still look like a tiny armadillo), and a big...
“Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Thank you to our listeners for this and other modern proverbs. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Modern Proverbs from...
Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game called “Centricity”, emphasis on the “city.” For example, “Mickey ate all the fruit, leaving Minneapolis.” And as George H.W. Bush said to George W. Bush, “You can be...
What came first, the color orange or the fruit? The original term is Sanskrit and refers to the fruit. As the fruit traveled west, the word came with it. Grant notes that, like the terms for parts of the body, the names of colors travel very well in...
The Bangladeshi idiom translated as oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit roughly matches English don’t count your chickens before they hatch. The image depends on cultural context: jackfruit is juicy, a mustache...