Remember those children’s classics, the Velveteen Rabbi and The Little Price? The Twitterverse is abound with these books with a letter missing. And it turns out there’s some pimping going on in our hospitals, but it’s not what...
Gina in Dallas wonders where her Louisiana family got croaker, their slang term for a $100 bill. The evidence is scant, but known examples point mostly to Louisiana, and standard dictionaries apparently do not include this sense. One plausible...
Revengelical n.— Note: A play on “Evangelical.” «Wasn’t it in Genesis (as Revengelicals follow the Old Testament pretty closely) that Moses was speaking with God over the fate of the “wicked” city Sodom and that if...
Humorist Roy Blount Jr. sits down with Grant for a conversation about the controversy over writers’ rights, the Amazon Kindle 2, Roy’s recent book, Alphabet Juice, “sonicky” words, and noodling for catfish. He also clears up...
The answer to the riddle “Nature requires five, custom gives seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven” is hours of sleep a night. It comes from a collection of riddles gathered from Black schoolchildren in New Orleans and printed in early...
Keith in San Diego grew up in South Louisiana saying get down to mean getting out of a car, as in asking passengers whether everyone is getting down. In Cajun country, that use is likely a calque, a direct translation from French, where descendre...