Alina from Fort Worth asks whether restaurant top, as in two-top, is an acronym. Probably not. It likely comes from the tabletop and its place settings, especially the distinction between seating diners at a table and putting them at the bar. Her...
A wedding photographer says she happens to run into lots of people who are three sheets to the wind, and wonders why that term came to mean “falling-down drunk.” Turns out, it’s from nautical terminology. On a seagoing vessel, the...
You know how it is when you encounter a word and then suddenly you start noticing it everywhere? One that’s seemed to pop up is cray, or cray-cray, a slang variant of crazy. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Cray”...
Like a boss means doing something with authority, style, or unbothered confidence, as April in Iowa City noticed in Facebook posts and other online chatter. Its internet popularity spiked after Andy Samberg of Saturday Night Live and The Lonely...
What is a hipster? Is it an insult to call someone a hipster, even if they’re, well, a hipster? Do hipsters identify themselves as hipsters? Grant traces the label from 1960s counterculture to today’s skinny-jeaned Brooklyn paradox. This...
If something is mathematical, is it cool? According to a mother of two middle-schoolers, that’s exactly what it’s come to mean among the younger set. Then again, irony is also pretty hip. But could her kids be using a piece of ironic...