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...
Alicia from Wilmington, North Carolina, says she grew using the word allow to mean “say” or “declare.” Sometimes rendered simply as ’low, this expression has been used since at least the 18th century. Another form meaning...
Melanie in San Antonio, Texas, wonders about the use of the word pallet to mean improvised bedding on the floor. It goes back to a French term for it, paillet, which comes from a word meaning straw. The word also appears in some translations of the...
Pam in Eureka, California, says that when her mother and grandmother would enter a particularly dark room, they’d remark that it was dark as the inside of a goat. Mark Twain used the phrase dark as the inside of a cow in his book Roughing It...
Scott in Billings, Montana, wonders about the word hornswoggle, meaning to swindle, bamboozle, deceive, or trick. This verb found its way into American English during the 1820’s, when there was a fad among newspaper editors and writers for inventing...
Gerrymandering draws political boundaries to tip elections towards certain political parties. Originally, the word was pronounced “GARY-mandering” with a hard “g.” But why? And why did it change? • Mark Twain and Helen Keller...