Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
Full as a goog is Australian English for completely stuffed, as after a big dinner. Ashley in Danville, Kentucky, learned it while living in Australia and still uses it when her twin daughters eat until their little bellies are taut. A goog is an...
Particularly in the Southern United States, there are lots of fanciful terms for “a sudden, heavy rain” that involve the downpour’s after-effects. For starters, there’s gully-washer, frog-strangler, toad-strangler, toadfrog-strangler, fish-drownder...
Rae from Baltimore, Maryland, works in a cardiac intervention lab where surgeons refer to the esophagus as the goose. Is that bit of medical slang limited to her workplace? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Goose, Esophagus” We...
A Temecula, California, man recalls that whenever he feels a chill, he says, “I guess someone walked on my grave.” If someone else feels a chill, he’ll say, “Did someone walk on your grave?” Then one day he shivered, and before he could get the...
A caller from East Tennessee swears that he’s heard ducks imitating the sounds of some nearby geese, and he’s probably right. Animals do indeed have the ability to mimic the sounds and behaviors of other species, but that doesn’t mean the animals...