Language is always evolving, and that’s also true for American Sign Language. A century ago, the sign for “telephone” was one fist below your mouth and the other at your ear, as if you’re holding an old-fashioned candlestick...
Lola in Madison, Wisconsin, just bought a 1921 house that has a separate room beside the kitchen for a dishwashing sink and cupboards. She and her partner are unsure what to call it. The sink room, maybe? Yes! The name reflects the history of how...
Jeepers creepers! Pass the gleepers! Mary in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wonders if anyone else uses the term gleepers to mean “a pair of tongs.” Gleepers may be just her own family’s term. Some people refer to them as clackers...
A listener who grew up in Ukraine recalls that her family always referred to chicken drumsticks by a name that translates as Bush’s legs. This jocular term refers to an agreement between U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader...
The verb duffifie is defined in the Scots National Dictionary as “to lay down a bottle on its side for some time, after its contents have been poured out, that it may be completely drained of the few drops remaining in it.” This is part...
Kid cheater and child cheater are synonyms for spatula, because when you’re baking a cake, a spatula is so efficient for removing the remnants of a sweet mixture from a bowl that there’s little left for a kid to lick off. This is part of...