Andrew from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, recalls a phrase his grandmother used: You’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die. A peck is a unit of dry measure equal to a quarter of a bushel. Peck is also a term of approximate measure, as in to...
Members of our Facebook group are inventing funny names for Greek gods by mispronouncing familiar words with the accent on the wrong syllable, such as Episodes /eh-PIH-suh-deez/, god of continuing stories, and Lemonades /leh-moe-NAH-deez/, god of...
More fanciful Greek god names proposed by our listeners: Vehicles, the god of getting there faster; Chronicles, god of boring old stories; and LEDes, god of lamps that don’t consume much energy. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript...
In The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon), Simon Winchester refers to piling Pelion upon Ossa, meaning “making a difficult situation even more difficult.” Pelion...
Diane calls from eastern North Carolina to talk about a phrase her father used if she asked him to repeat something: I never chew my celery twice. He probably conflated the idea of chewing celery with some far more common expressions involving doing...
Celia, from Spokane, Washington, is unhappy that fewer and fewer English speakers seem aware of the correct plurals of Latin and Greek words. She is bothered, for example, when someone refers to minimums rather than minima. Minima is more often a...