During a visit to Lee High School in Huntstville, Alabama, we collected a treasure trove of slang, including a term that seems to be particular to the Huntsville area: forf, which as a verb means to fail to follow through on commitments, and as a...
At Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama, students use snack for an attractive person: someone who looks like a good snack. A step up from that is whole meal, for someone even more appealing. Snack in this sense is fairly widespread in the United...
Cindy in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is going through her mother’s diary from the 1930’s and finds the term high-hat used as a transitive verb. To high-hat someone means to act in a supercilious, condescending, affected manner, as if...
A Huntsville, Alabama, man asks: What’s the origin of the peace symbol? A good resource on its history is Peace: The Biography of a Symbol, by Ken Kolsbun. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Peace Symbol Origins”...
A listener in Huntsville, Alabama, says that in her native Scotland, the phrase send out for messages means to send someone to go shopping. The phrase stems from a time when the person going out to do the shopping or run other errands would also...
What’s the best way for someone busy to learn lots of new words quickly for a test like the GRE? Looking up their origins can help. Or, record yourself reading the words and definitions and play them back while you’re doing other chores...