Clabberhead is a mild rebuke that suggests someone has a curdled dairy product for brains, clabber being sour milk, ultimately from an Irish Gaelic term for “mud.” The Dictionary of American Regional English has a good history of clabberhead. In...
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s poem “In Praise of Mystery” will travel to the planet Jupiter on the Europa Clipper spacecraft. With the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America, Limon has also launched a project called “You Are Here”...
If you’re on tenterhooks, it means you’re in a state of anxious anticipation or suspense. But what IS a tenterhook? The answer goes back to a 15th-century manufacturing process. Also, you probably have a term for those crumbs that collect in the...
In Washington, DC, National Park Service employees refer to Ford’s Theater as FOTH, Peterson House as PEHO, and the Washington Monument as WAMO. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Attraction Abbreviations” We got a cool letter from...
cherry-stem v.— «At meetings with various groups during the past few years, the National Park Service had said that some areas within the recommended wilderness boundary could be “cherry- stemmed” out from the wilderness boundary as “minor...