Marian from Schroon Lake, New York, says her family plays an egg-tapping game after every Easter egg hunt. Each player takes an egg and taps it against someone else’s, hoping that their own egg won’t crack. The egg that survives a round of...
What happens in a classroom of refugee and immigrant youngsters learning English? Their fresh approach to language can result in remarkable poetry — some of which is collected in the anthology England: Poems from a School. Also, new language among...
Susan, a librarian in Grant County, Kentucky, says her spouse, who is from the Cincinnati area, uses the expression Please? to mean “How’s that?” or “Come again?” or “Excuse me?” to get someone to repeat a statement. This dialectal feature is...
Carol from Clays Ferry, Kentucky, remembers her grandmother’s warning dasn’t, as in “We dasn’t do that,” used in the 1950s to steer a child away from rough raspberry-picking or a furnace chain. Dasn’t is a contraction of dares not or dare not...
The mealtime admonition “someone has to finish this up so the sun shines tomorrow” comes from a German saying that goes back at least 150 years. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “So the Sun Shines Tomorrow” Hello, you have A Way...
“You little snickelfritz!” An Indiana man says his mother used to call him that when she meant “You little rascal!” Although the term’s meaning has changed over time, its original meaning was a bit naughty. This is part of a complete episode...