A Navy veteran recalls hearing the Southern expression fat lighter from his wife’s family in Troy, Alabama. It denotes an old, resin-rich pine wood that becomes highly flammable as it ages. Fat lighter is prized as kindling and often called fat...
A profile in The New Yorker of writer Patricia Lockwood, author of Will There Ever Be Another You (Bookshop|Amazon) opens by saying she has “the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid,” a description the quirky author herself...
Frederick from Valdosta, Georgia, wonders about the term galley-west. To knock something galley-west means to “knock it into confusion” “send everything in all directions.” In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Aunt Sally angrily throws a...
Joan from Augusta, Georgia, says her grandfather used to pronounce the word onions as if they were spelled ernions. The word onion is adapted from the French cognate oignon, and thanks to variations in dialect, geography, and other factors, this...
Lee in Charleston, South Carolina, remembers her dad used to refer to a blue patch of sky after a rain as kitten’s britches. Similar terms include Dutchman’s trousers, old woman’s apron, and cat’s vest, all suggesting that small but promising bit of...
Edward in Atlanta, Georgia, asks about the origin and uses of blah, blah, blah, the sing-song stand-in for omitted or tiresome talk. A single blah can mean dull or listless, as in “feeling blah,” while repeated blahs often replace words a speaker...