A Vermont caller has been told that when she was a young child, she had imaginary friends named Hooney and Dedilae. How do children choose names for their imaginary friends? As Marjorie Taylor and Naomi Aguiar show in their book Imaginary Friends...
Published in the mid-19th century, the poem “A Chapter of Ifs” elaborates at length on the phrase If ifs and ands were pots and pans. The gist is that one shouldn’t dwell upon things that may not come to pass. This is part of a complete episode...
Randy from Live Oak, Florida, remembers a man in Central Florida who often added a few words to a simple sentence of explanation, usually thing ‘ere or thing like that and all. That might just reflect his own habitual way of speaking. Entertainer...
Sherry from Green Bay, Wisconsin, remembers that whenever she balked at doing a chore as a kid, her grandmother would say If ifs and ands were pots and pans, a tinker would have no trade. Her grandmother was suggesting that merely paying lip service...
A Montreal, Canada, woman wonders why sometimes in old manuscripts the letter s looks like the letter f. A great resource on this topic is Andrew West’s blog Babelstone. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Why Did They Write the...
A woman in Monkton, Vermont, says that when she and her 91-year-old mother return from a leisurely drive, her mother will proclaim, “That was a nice ride around the gool.” The phrase going around the gool appears in the Dictionary of American...