In Spanish, someone who’s conceited may be described as considering themselves la ultima Coca-Cola del desierto or “the last Coca-Cola in the desert.” Similar Spanish phrases are rendered in English as “the last beer in the stadium” or “the last...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add the definite...
Chrissie in Arlington, Virginia, has fond memories of her family playing bridge together. Whenever a trick with four cards that included an ace, a two card, a three card, and a four card was played, her grandmother would chuckle and say, Ace, two...
English spelling is a hot mess, even for native speakers. But as a new book shows, would-be spelling reformers, including Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, eventually just gave up. Also, what do you call your fellow parent in front of the...
We’ve previously discussed when pigs fly and other idioms expressing profound skepticism that something will occur. That prompted an email from Guillermo in Tucson, Arizona, who shared a Spanish phrase that conveys a similar idea: cuando la rana...
Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...