It’s hard to hold a baby when he’s rutching around. Rutching, or rutsching, which means slipping, sliding, and squirming around, comes from German, and is used in the United States in with a Pennsylvania Dutch history. This is part of a...
Bummer, the small-disappointment word, traces back to German bummler, a loafer or drifter. English soon had bum in a similar sense, and its negative associations later attached to phrases such as bum deal, bum rap, and bum trip. By the late 1960s...
A line from The Moor of Venice, “that I would liefer bide,” features an old word for rather that shares a root with the words love and leave, as in by your leave. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “I Would...
Lena, a physician in Oceanside, California, asks about medical pimping: the ritual of a senior doctor quizzing a student, intern, or resident with questions that often get harder until the trainee misses one, sometimes in front of peers. The term...
Remember those children’s classics, the Velveteen Rabbi and The Little Price? The Twitterverse is abound with these books with a letter missing. And it turns out there’s some pimping going on in our hospitals, but it’s not what...
Daniel, just outside Penetanguishene, Ontario, grew up in a family with Oklahoma Cherokee ties and heard his grandfather call himself Black Dutch, apparently to deny Native ancestry in a racist setting. The term is a knotty racial descriptor...