Travis in Austin, Texas, has a dispute with friends: is the popular sorting game called paper, scissors, rock, as he believes? Or is it rock, paper, scissors? In the United States, the latter is the more common variant, although people have...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a “takeoff” quiz, in which the letter C is removed from a word to yield a rhyming two-word phrase. For example, if someone wanted to find out how old an animal enclosure is, what would they be trying to find...
When it comes to learning new things, what’s on your bucket list? A retired book editor decided to try to learn Latin, and ended up learning a lot about herself. There’s a word for someone who learns something late in life. And when it...
A listener in Carmel, New York, remembers his father’s phrase knuckle down, screw bony tight, a challenge called out to someone particularly adept at playing marbles. The game of marbles, once wildly popular in the United States, is a rich...
Janice from Jericho, Vermont, remembers hearing jackpot used to mean trouble in the world of horse racing. That “trouble” sense has been part of the word from the beginning. In early poker, a player needed a pair of jacks to open the betting, so the...
In baseball, a two-o’clock hitter is one who hits well in batting practice, but not during the game. It used to be that games traditionally started at 3 p.m., with batting practice an hour before. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...