On a busy day in the emergency room, Alisa of Dallas, Texas, told an efficient colleague that she was really humming, meaning it as a compliment. Her colleague took offense, maintaining that humming meant “smelly.” Since the 18th...
The phrase This ain’t my first rodeo, meaning “This isn’t my first time” or “I already have experience with this” goes back at least as far as the 1981 Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest, where Faye Dunaway as...
Katie in Kalamazoo, Michigan, wonders about the expression throw the book at, meaning to “try every means possible.” Did it originally involve literally throwing books? It’s just a metaphor in which the book refers to “the...
Why does the expression in spades mean “in abundance”? This is part of a complete episode.
When a listener from Buffalo, New York, was a child, she was told to stop being so rutschy, or in other words, to stop being so “fidgety.” Rutsch, meaning “to squirm,” and its variants, which include rooch and roosh, come...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle is proof positive that words aren’t always what they seem, especially words that begin with the letters re-. For example, say John was driving along a road and turned right, then drove a little more and...