Jill from Greenville, South Carolina, wants to know why pickle automatically means “pickled cucumber,” as opposed to other pickled vegetables, such as onions and carrots. The answer has to do with prototypicality, the cultural agreement that one...
Why tell someone they’re sexy when you can let them know they’re good as corn? That’s what the Portuguese say, along with “taking his little horse away from the rain,” an idiom that means giving up. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski is back with a game called Definitely Cryptic, where the article “a” is combined with a word to form a new word. Try this one: “glass container; slightly open.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Definitely...
It’s always fun to catch moviemakers’ blunders. Say you’re watching an epic about ancient Rome and spot a toga-clad extra who forgot to remove his wristwatch. That’s an anachronism. But what do you call something that’s geographically incorrect...
Carol in Hamden, Connecticut, grew up hearing her Tennessee stepfather use unthaw to mean thaw, then saw a cornbread recipe calling for frozen corn kernels, “unthawed.” The verb unthaw is a dialectal form found in parts of the United States...
ambulance-chasing n.— «Scientists sensationalize stuff because they get noticed… They’re staking out their territory, causing alarm, so that there’s more funding in that area.…There is more and more a trend to what some people call “ambulance...