Mackenzie from Green Bay, Wisconsin, learned the word agita from a friend in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She uses it to refer to “that heavy, sluggish feeling one gets after eating too much,” the feeling some call the meat sweats. The word agita comes...
Brittany in Green Coast Springs, Florida, says that when she was grumpy or irritated as a child, her mother would say a phrase that sounded like Don’t be such a scooch. This bit of Italian-American slang, often rendered as skutch, denotes a “pest”...
Candace from Memphis, Tennessee, wonders about the phrase You’re eating me out of house and home. The emphatic doublet house and home is part of a long tradition that includes scared out of house and home and chased out of house and home. Even...
In English, a clumsy persona may be said to have butterfingers, but Italians refer to such a person with a phrase that translates as “having pastry-dough hands.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Pastry-Dough Hands” In English, we...
The casual phrase good enough for who it’s for suggests that something wasn’t done perfectly, but was done well enough. This saying is not all that common, but it’s been around for at least a century. Similar expressions used in the construction...
Why do we write the sound of a dog barking as bow wow? Isn’t that noise more like woof, woof or arf, arf or ruff ruff? Surprisingly, the oldest of these is bow wow, or as William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest (Bookshop|Amazon), bowgh wawgh. It’s...
