Abishek in Gaffney, South Carolina, found himself using the word Tetrising to refer to trying to pack a lot of small items into a moving van, based on the video game Tetris, in which players try to make various combinations of squares all fit...
If someone urges you to spill the tea, they probably don’t want you tipping over a hot beverage. Originally, the tea here was the letter T, as in “truth.” To spill the T means to “pass along truthful information.” Plus...
A mental health therapist wonders about the origin of the term manic. It derives from Greek mania, meaning “madness” or “frenzy,” from an older root that gives us mind and mental. From the same root comes maniac. The word...
Tim from Jacksonville, Florida, gets teased for the way he says the word milk, which he pronounces as melk and the word eggs, which he pronounces as aigs. It’s not uncommon for what linguists call lax vowel lowering to occur, and these...
In the U.S. the verb mooch means “to get something without paying for it.” In the UK, mooch means “window shopping.” Linguist Lynne Murphy writes about this and other differences in her helpful blog, Separated by a Common...
When he lived in Nova Scotia, Jeffrey from Montreal, Canada, noted that the word some was often used as an intensifier, as in That’s some good or She’s some pretty or She’s right some pretty. Also common in the dialects of...