Margo from Denton, Texas, says when the weather was really cold, her Kentucky-born grandmother would say it was cold as agga forti. The term aggie forti refers to something really strong, particularly a strong drink. That expression and the variants...
Patricia from Fort Worth, Texas, has been mystified by an expression her husband’s grandmother would use when trying to avoid answering a question about where something had gone. She’d say it’s gone where the woodbine twineth and...
In response to our conversation about names we call grandparents, John Polk tweeted about a grandfather in his family named Uh-Huh and a grandmother named Who-Who. This is part of a complete episode.
Tim from Manhattan Beach, California, says his grandmother used to carry a brown paper bag and call it her poke sack. The word poke, in this case, means bag, making poke sack a pleonasm, which is an expression using more words than necessary to...
Pam in Eureka, California, says that when her mother and grandmother would enter a particularly dark room, they’d remark that it was dark as the inside of a goat. Mark Twain used the phrase dark as the inside of a cow in his book Roughing It...
Victoria from Tallahassee, Florida, weighs in on our discussion about terms for an extremely quick bath. When Victoria was young, her great-great grandmother from Poland, when checking if Victoria had indeed washed herself, would ask...
