Jan from Madison, Wisconsin, remembers her grandfather saying ignorance gone to seed about anything that struck him as really stupid. On its own, gone to seed means moved beyond the point of cultivation, like an untended yard full of tall stems and...
Hundreds of years ago, the word girl could refer to a child of either gender, and the word boy applied specifically to a servant. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a useful resource for understanding which terms were in...
Sunny-side up eggs sometime go by the name looking at you eggs, an apparent reference to how the yolk in the middle of the egg white makes them resemble eyes. A similar idea appears in the German name, which translates as “mirror egg,”...
Bald-headed can mean headlong or completely, as in going at something bald-headed. Mike in Madison, Wisconsin, remembers his mother and grandmother, both from Oklahoma, warning, I’m going to pinch you bald-headed, though pinch is an uncommon variant...
To throw your hat into the room is to ascertain whether someone’s angry with you, perhaps stemming from the idea of tossing your hat in ahead of to see if someone shoots at it. Ronald Reagan used the expression this way when apologizing to...
Apple core, Baltimore! Who’s your friend? is a playground-style apple-core tossing chant, which Travis in Madison, Wisconsin, heard from his father well into adulthood. In one version, the apple eater calls out the rhyme, waits for someone to name a...
