Jacob in Frankfort, Kentucky, remembers that on foggy mornings in Appalachia, he’d hear grownups say that the groundhogs are making coffee. Writer Jesse Stuart, who served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate in the mid-1950s, wrote evocatively...
The dated term “jingoism” denotes a kind of belligerent nationalism but the word’s roots lie in an old English drinking-house song that was popular during wartime. Speaking of fightin’ words, the expression “out the side of...
life-flight v. phr.— «And that’s when he trots out his new verb. We’ve heard of someone being life-flighted. But Groundhog-Day-ing? Sure it’ll make the wonky hosts of “A Way With Words” shudder, but hey, it works.» —“Old...