Linda from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, gives directions to her remote home by telling people to turn left after the whoopsy-daisy, her term for a sudden dip in the road. There are quite a few colloquial expressions for such abrupt depression or...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work humans...
In the Scots language, pree means “to taste” or “sample.” If you pree someone’s mouth, then you give them a kiss on the lips. It’s a variant of the word prove, and cognate with Spanish probar, to “taste.” This is part of a complete episode...
Belly tickler, dipsy doodle, johnny-come-lately, duck and dip, how-do-you-do, tickle bump, yes-ma’am, thank-you-ma’am, kiss-me-quick, and (especially in Canada) cahot all mean “a bump in the road.” Particularly in southwest Pennsylvania, the term...
Andrea in Haslett, Michigan, and her six-year-old daughter Neevee had a question about the way we show love in writing. When they were texting back and forth with Neevee’s daddy, she got to wondering where where we get X and O for kisses and hugs...
Ingrid Bergman once said, “a kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Ingrid Bergman Quote” Grant, I came across this great quotation about words the...