Goombah, also spelled goomba, can refer to an Italian-American man, sometimes disparagingly. In medical slang, Victoria, a geriatrics fellow in Dallas, has heard goomba for an impressive mass or blotch on an image, as in a lung mass on a chest X-ray...
How do you make a room dark? Do you shut the lights, cut the lights, or turn off the lights? “Shut the light,” as Bob Dylan sang, may derive from old lanterns on which you’d shut a little door. They’re all correct, though...
Why is “colonel” pronounced like “kernel”? The original form comes from Italy, where a colonello was in charge of a column of soldiers. As the word moved from Italian to French, it took on an r sound, but the English...
Our two most recently aired episodes were Going All-City last week and The College Slang Party the week before that. They’re reruns more than six months old — which means you’ve forgotten half of what’s in them, right? Give...
Yo! Who you callin’ a jabroni? And what exactly is a jabroni, anyway? Also, what do vintage school buses and hack writers have in common? Grant and Martha trace the origins of famous quotes, and a listener offers a clever new way to say...
What came first, the color orange or the fruit? The original term is Sanskrit and refers to the fruit. As the fruit traveled west, the word came with it. Grant notes that, like the terms for parts of the body, the names of colors travel very well in...
