Sheep-dipping is a business term for when employees are made to drink the Kool-Aid, often at tedious briefings or sales seminars they’re forced to attend. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Sheep-Dipping” Hi, you have A Way with...
After student Leo spotted the phrase, Chris, a fifth-grade teacher in San Diego, California, asks why a thesaurus offered cooking with gas as a synonym for okay. The expression Now you’re cooking with gas emerged in the mid-to-late 1930s, when the...
Long before English speakers adopted the suffix –orama, as in Scoutorama and smell-o-rama, there was the French word panorama referring to “a great display or spectacle.” Panorama comes from Greek words that mean “whole view.” University of Alabama...
Mary in Dallas started hearing cadence at work in phrases like business cadence and organization cadence. In office jargon, it refers to a regular rhythm for scheduling, product releases, reporting, or sales targets. The business use may have been...
The poet Marianne Moore was once asked to come up with car names for the Ford Motor Company, and if it wasn’t for the genius of their own term, the Edsel, we could’ve been driving around in Resilient Bullets, Varsity Strokes, or Utopian Turtletops...
Jeremy Dick, a listener from Victoria, Australia, grew up in Canada loving the movie The Mighty Ducks. But once he moved down under, he realized the Aussies call it Champions. What’s that all about? Do Australians not think ducks are mighty? TV...