Mike in Nicholasville, Kentucky, remembers that his grandfather sometimes accepted an invitation with Can’t dance, and too wet to plow meaning that he “might as well.” A longer version goes Can’t dance, never could sing, and...
Eight-year-old Violet in Zionsville, Indiana, grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, saying sprinkles more like sprankles, rhyming with rankles. On paper, the cupcake topping is spelled sprinkles, with an i; in speech, her family’s pronunciation is simply...
Mark from Newport News, Virginia, says his mother, who grew up in Fancy Farm, Kentucky, often used a puzzling phrase. To ask how close he was to completing a task, she’d say what sounded like How much do you like? In parts of the Southern...
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...
Monica says that generations of children in her Augusta, Kentucky, neighborhood would go tick-tacking, or playing pranks during the nights leading up to Halloween — soaping car windows, tossing corn kernels onto front porches, leaving flaming paper...
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 for a...