In the Eastern and Southern United States, freezing rain that leaves everything covered with ice is simply known as an ice storm. In the Pacific Northwest, this sort of freezing rain goes by a more poetic name: silver thaw. This is part of a...
How do you pronounce Missouri? Is it /miz-URR-ee/ or /miz-URR-uh/? There are actually four distinct pronunciations of this word. Linguist Donald Lance of the University of Missouri-Columbia studied the history of this name extensively and found that...
In English, if you doubt what someone is telling you, you can say so with such idioms as Stop pulling my leg or Pull the other one — it has bells on. Other languages have similarly colorful phrases for expressing skepticism. In French, you might say...
A 1946 article in the California Folklore Quarterly features a collection of folks sayings from a pioneer family in Western Oregon, including this phrase to describe the one person in town who seems to know everybody’s business: He knew everybody...
Tabitha from Palmer, Alaska, grew up hearing her mother from southern Missouri say Stop wooling me! when a restless child was squirming on her lap. The verb wool, as in wooling someone or wooling a baby around, has been heard in parts of the South...
Jerry in Reno grew up hearing older relatives say don’t get your bauber in the dirt or keep your bauber out of the dirt, meaning don’t be discouraged or pout. Related forms, usually dobber and sometimes dauber, appear in slang and dialect...