Karen in Tucson, Arizona, heard biffy at a youth camp, where a jeweled plunger marked the award for the cleanest outhouse. The camp explanation, Bathroom in Forest for You, has the smell of a backronym, which means it was made after biffy already...
Baseball slang collected during the 1930s includes fishing trip for “taking a swing at a bad ball,” pour the pine for “to hit a good ball solidly,” and the derisive term collisions for “college players,”, that is...
Sundance from Dallas, Texas, asks whether his daughter’s near-miss clinky-dink and the family word coinkydink count as “real” language. Coinkydink, a joking reshaping of coincidence, belongs to a broader habit of deliberate mispronunciation and...
Paul in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, has noticed that some people pronounce street as shtreet and straight as shtraight. Why do some people use that SH sound? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Pronouncing Street as Shtreet and...
Take a look back at some notable words and phrases from 2017: Remember path of totality? How about milkshake duck? Also, a committee has to choose a new mascot for a school’s sports teams. They want to call them the Knights, as in the fighters...
How do you pronounce the word potable, which means drinkable? A woman in the Navy stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, says most of her fellow sailors pronounce it with a short o, but she pronounces it with a long o. The word derives from Latin potare...