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...
Calley from Bowling Green, Kentucky, wonders about the word zonked, meaning “exhausted.” Like the word conk, as in conked out, meaning “fast asleep,” zonk originally had to do with a blow to the head. This is part of a...
Grant responds to a voicemail from Doug in Louisville, Kentucky, who asks whether our phone’s autocomplete function will affect the way we talk and write. The answer is yes, partly because of Markov chains, or models describing a sequence of...
A listener reports being puzzled by a phrase she heard from a woman for whom she’d done a small favor: Did you think you’d taken me to raise? Heard mainly in Kentucky and Ohio, this phrase is a joking suggestion that the person who has...