Victor, a film noir fan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says closed captioning has made him newly aware of dialogue he’d previously missed. Watching The Maltese Falcon, for example, he ran into the phrase crackin’ foxy. The crack is the same crack as...
Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap that...
After our conversation about Off we go like a herd of turtles, often said by a parent gathering kids to leave the house, Joanna in Santa Cruz, California, shares the one she heard from her father: Here we go, laughing and scratching! In 1939...
Ken in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, wonders about the use of a couple of interjections. Why don’t people begin sentences with the word Say any more? And is it impolite to start a sentence with Hey? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Has the age of email led to an outbreak of exclamation marks? Do women use them more than men? Also, is there a word for the odd feeling when you listen to a radio personality for years, then discover that they look nothing like your mental picture...
Bogart, meaning to hog or monopolize something, does trace back to actor Humphrey Bogart. The verb first meant to bully or intimidate, as in forcing your way into a club, and dates to about the 1950s. By the late 1960s it had shifted toward taking...
