What’s in YOUR spice rack? Say you’re cooking up a pot of chili, and you need to add more of that warm, earthy, powdered spice. Do you reach for a bottle of KOO-min? KYOO-min? Or are you going to add KUMM-in? The pronunciation given in dictionaries...
Listener K.C. Gandee, a whitewater rafting guide from Bethel, Maine, tipped us off to lingo from his world. Dead-sticking is when the guide is doing all the paddling and no one else is. A lily dipper is someone who barely paddles while everyone else...
White-livered, like lily-livered, can mean cowardly or timid. Cree, whose grandmother is from Mississippi, heard a different Southern folk meaning: a person with a white liver, or white spots on the liver, was thought to have an insatiable sexual...
Pet names often take a while to settle, then keep changing. A tiny Maltese-poodle mix arrived as Mitzi, nearly became Daisy or Cucaracha, and finally became Lily, a name easy to call out in the urgent phrase “Lily, no!” A Great Pyrenees named Bandy...
lily-pad n.— «At Nordson, Mr. Madar has been using what he terms a “lily pad to lily pad” growth strategy, jumping from one new market to another nearby one “rather than leap across the pond or into an entirely different pond.”» —“Nordson Is Poised...
pumpkin lily n. an effete or unskilled person; a novice. Also punkin lily. Editorial Note: Nearly all discovered uses this term, including the 1922 and 1958 citations below, come from descriptions of Teddy Roosevelt, then aged 25, at the time of his...
