An Omaha, Nebraska man wonders about starting a sentence with the word anymore, meaning “nowadays.” Linguists refer to this usage as positive anymore, which is common in much of the Midwest and stems from Scots-Irish syntax. This is part...
Delope is a term used in duelling meaning to throw away one’s shot — specifically, to fire into the air rather than at an opponent. The word appears in The Art of Duelling from 1836 with the spelling dilope and the gloss “fire in the air.” The...
For English speakers of a certain age, film at 11 is a slang phrase means “You’ll hear the details later.” It’s a reference to the days before 24-hour cable news, when newscasters would read headlines during the day promoting...
A listener in Honolulu, Hawaii, wonders about an expression used by her husband’s grandmother, who was from eastern Kentucky: “He left so fast, that you could have played marbles on his coattails.” The notion that a person is...
If you’re serious about writing a memoir, what topics should you include, and what can you leave out? And how honest can you really be about the other people in your life? Some of America’s leading memoirists wrote things they lived to...
“Helicopter parents” are so named because of their tendency to hover over their children’s lives. A Kentucky listener who made an initial college visit with her son reports two variations that she learned from staffers:...