A grandmother in Ferndale, California, wonders about a phrase her own grandmother used. If one of the grandchildren walked into a room and joined a conversation already taking place, she’d exclaim, “Oh! Another country heard from!”...
A listener in Honolulu, Hawaii, wonders about an expression used by her husband’s grandmother, who was from eastern Kentucky: “He left so fast, that you could have played marbles on his coattails.” The notion that a person is...
A caller with a 25-year-old parrot wonders: How much language do birds really understand? Plus, Knock-knock. Who’s there? Boo. Well… you can guess the rest. But there was a time when these goofy jokes were a brand-new craze sweeping the nation...
A native New Yorker who lived as a boy with his grandmother in South Carolina recalls coming home late one day and offering a long-winded excuse, prompting his grandmother to declare, “Boy, you’re as deep as the sea!” She probably...
A listener in Bayfield, Wisconsin, says her grandmother used to tell her to “go sozzle in the bathtub.” John Russell Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms defines the verb to sozzle this way: “to loll; to lounge; to go...
When two people are walking side-by-side holding hands but briefly separate to go around an obstacle on opposite sites, they might say “bread and butter.” This phrase apparently stems from an old superstition that if the two people want...