The expression to turn on a dime means “to change quickly.” Early on the phrase referred to horses or horse-drawn vehicles and later to motorized ones, and suggested the idea of changing direction quickly and easily without needing a large turning...
The expression to go chalk has to do with rankings in an athletic tournament and harks back to when seeded teams or players were listed on a chalkboard. To pick chalk means to choose one’s favorite competitor, and you can also speak of a chalk...
Byron in Jacksonville, Florida, shares that when his mother was astonished, she’d say Don’t that beat all! But when really surprised, she’d exclaim, That beats bobtail and bobtail beats the devil! What’s a bobtail and how could it beat the devil...
It may not be as rich a source of slang as baseball, but golf has contributed several terms to English, including stymie, “to get in the way of,” mulligan, a “do-over,” and par for the course, meaning “normal.” Although the word handicap is often...
Amanda in Melbourne, Australia, provides a much better way to read the rebus about racehorses that we shared in a previous episode. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Racing Rebus Redux” A few weeks ago, I said that a listener had...
Why do we use the word heat to denote a preliminary qualifying race? Hundreds of years ago, a single instance of heating something such as a piece of metal over a fire for metalworking was called a heat. Later that term was applied to “a round of...
