Holly from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, remembers her grandmother loading family dinners with pepper and saying they wouldn’t get the pip. The pepper appears to be a folk-remedy flourish, not part of the word’s origin. The pip, also the pips, has...
Inspired by the the short-lived meme OK Boomer, Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a puzzle with similarly dismissive two-word phrases that begin with OK and end with a noun with a final -er. For example, if a friend who is the former mayor of Bangor...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle this week was inspired by the Gersberms meme, and involves adding R sounds to book titles to create books with entirely different plots. For example what George Orwell novella would be about a horse, a duck, a...
After our conversation about a verbose admonition to use short words, a Tallahassee, Florida, man called with a version he learned as a boy: Do you have the audacity to doubt my veracity? Or even to insinuate that I would prevaricate? While...
Many kids are saying derp in place of duh, and the phenomenon is largely due to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s use of the term in their movie Baseketball and their television show South Park. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
A question for heterosexual guys: What words do you use to describe other men who are good-looking? Attractive? Handsome? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Describing Good-Looking Men” Hello, you have A Way with Words...

