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...
Tom in Canton, Texas, remembers fellow high school students in Israel saying in Arabic that they were taking bus number 11, a joking way to mean walking. The image is right there in the numerals: the two straight 1s look like a pair of legs, much...
When you say, “I’ll get a ride with Pat and Charlie” or “I’m going to go with Pat and Charlie,” you’re talking about walking somewhere. Other colloquial ways to describe traveling on foot include getting...
When wine drinkers swirl their glass and watch those streaks coming down, they say they’re looking at the legs. But the German term kirchenfenster, meaning “church windows,” makes a great substitute because of the arches of church...
Understandings aren’t just for epistemologists and marriage counselors. In the 18th Century, the slang term understandings was a jocular name for “boots” or “shoes.” Later, the word also came to be a joking term for...