Adam in Abilene, Texas, has fond memories of his mother’s Tex-Mex recipe in a casserole dish. Is it properly called a casserole? A tamale pie? It has to do with whether the dish is baked or not. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Everyone knows you don’t start a sentence with but. But why? Also, how voice recognition technology is changing the way we think and write and what English sounds like to foreigners. Plus, where cockamamie comes from, oddly translated movie titles...
What do you call that embellishment at the bottom of old signatures, like the hash-marked line beneath John Hancock’s name? It’s called a paraph, originally used as a distinct mark to protect against forgery. This is part of a complete episode...
A San Diego caller wonders about the expression a-gogo, as in the name of a local restaurant, Hash House A Go Go. Where’d it come from? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “A-GoGo” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi there, this is...
If a restaurant menu states, “We cook off our potatoes,” what in the heck does that mean? A truck driver who encountered such an announcement at a roadside cafe is still puzzling over what it means to “cook off” a tuber. He phones in to hash it out.
hashtag n.— «What does it mean when somebody puts a number sign before a word in an online post? That’s called a hashtag, for the hash mark preceding the word (right, yet another name for the symbol we also call the number sign and the pound sign)...