Michael in Morgantown, Kentucky, is pondering his grandfather’s phrase He fotched a heave and catched a fall meaning someone “made a quick bodily movement and fell.” Fotched is a dialectal past tense of fetch. This is part of a...
Two close friends from Richmond, Kentucky, call to share their hilarious dispute about how to correctly describe the one of them who’s always to blame for something. Is she the fault default or the default fault? This is part of a complete...
When writing his doctoral dissertation, John in Bardstown, Kentucky, used an upside-down question mark after a comment to indicate he was being sarcastic. Is there a punctuation mark that serves this function? Over the centuries, several have been...
Eight-year-old Violet moved from Lexington, Kentucky to Zionsville, Indiana, and found other kids don’t share her pronunciation of sprinkles as ‘spræŋk(ə)ls, rhyming with “rankles.” Who’s right? This is part of a...
Rachel in Lexington, Kentucky, says her dad had a ready response whenever someone said they forgot what they were going to say: It must have been a lie. This rejoinder apparently goes back to a joke that’s been around since at least the 1920s...
Remlap, Alabama and Trebloc, Mississippi are examples of ananyms — names formed by spelling a word backward, making them a kind of anagram. In the case of the Alabama town, it’s named after the Palmer family, and the Mississippi town is named...