Since the early 19th century, to soft-soap someone is to flatter them or give them excessively deferential treatment. The idea is that soft soap is unctuous and if you pour soft soap down someone’s back or pour soft soap into someone’s ear, it’s...
Birds inhabit many English words and phrases. The flower called larkspur is named for the way its blossom resembles the spur on the toe of a lark. Columbine derives from Latin columba, “dove,” a reference to the way this flower resembles doves...
Why is an exciting event called a barnburner? A real barn on fire can be a spectacular sight, with so many combustible materials inside. Metaphorically, then, a barnburner is a “humdinger” or a “doozy.” There’s also a political sense of barnburner...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been puzzling over metaphors that involve an action performed on a noun. For example, say he’s writing an essay and suddenly gets some new ideas that inspire him. It’s not literally that he was traveling in a car that was...
A French idiom that means “to sleep in” or “lie around lazily in bed after waking” is faire la grasse matinée, literally to “make the fat morning.” If you fall in love easily, you’re said to have un coeur d’artichaut, or “an artichoke heart.” That...
In a conversation with novelist Ann Patchett, writer Elizabeth McCracken makes a pithy observation about the difference between a novel and a short story. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Difference Between a Novel and a Short...