From listener Richard Gaillard comes this question: I lived in North Carolina most of my life and in the North Carolina mountains for 11 years. Working as a carpenter I heard lots of slang terms. One exclamation (almost expletive) I heard often, and...
Martha’s been reading the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English again, and stumbled across a synonym for “fried chicken.” It’s preacher meat. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Preacher Meat” Grant, do you know what preacher meat is...
If you’re fair to middling (or with the g dropped: fair to middlin’), you’re doing just fine. A native of the Tennessee mountains wonders about the origin of this phrase her good-humored grandfather used. As it turns out, fair to middling was one of...
Grant reads from a listener’s favorite poem by Lisel Mueller called “Why We Tell Stories.” It reads in part: “We sat by the fire in our caves,/ and because we were poor, we made up a tale/ about a treasure mountain/ that would open only for us.”...
J-hopping n.— «To jump a pair of foot-high tree roots spanning a trail in Woodland Park, mountain bike instructor Simon Lawton uses a technique called J-hopping which, like the Ollie skateboard move, is something I still can’t get my head around...
windlip n.—Gloss: a snowdrift created by the wind in a high place. «“In Fairbanks there wasn’t any parks or jumps, so you just learned to hit whatever you had—natural hits, lips, windlips.”…Bell and Hebert link the tricks they first learned on hay...
