Carol from Clays Ferry, Kentucky, remembers her grandmother’s warning dasn’t, as in “We dasn’t do that,” used in the 1950s to steer a child away from rough raspberry-picking or a furnace chain. Dasn’t is a contraction of dares not or dare not...
Cindy in Spokane, Washington, says her father would bid his loved ones good-bye by saying tap ’er light. The phrase comes from miners’ slang of the early 1900s and is a gentle admonition to take care to avoid cave-ins or prematurely detonating...
“Save your breath to cool your soup” is centuries old, including variants with porridge, pottage, broth, and other things. In all those cases, it’s a wry way to tell someone to be less long-winded. This is part of a complete...
Flee Fly Flo is a camp song, and like other songs passed along orally, it has lots of variations, and often includes rhythmic hand-clapping. In her book Camp Songs, Folk Songs, Patricia Averill suggests the roots of this camp favorite may be in scat...
Savannah from Richmond, Virginia, heard a home video in which her great-grandmother from rural Central Texas called a male relative someone’s old scratch, then seemed embarrassed. Old Scratch means the devil or Satan, and in that family context, it...