Mary-Clare recalls that when she was growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, everyone she knew used the term hoosier as a kind of teasing pejorative. If someone did something silly, others would say You’re such a hoosier, the adjective hoozh, or jokingly...
Sean from Buffalo, New York, says that whenever someone burped, his mother would say Well, bring it up again and we’ll vote on it. There are many of these so-called wrongs of passage, such as Six more and we’ll have 7-Up! Another good...
Carl in Sebastopol, California, was reminded of his childhood on New York’s Lower East Side while ready Harry Golden’s book For 2 Cents Plain (Amazon), the title referring to how customers ordered a plain glass of seltzer. For a little...
One way to make your new business look trendy is to use two nouns separated by an ampersand, like Peach & Creature or Rainstorm & Egg or … just about any other two-word combination. A tongue-in-cheek website will generate names like...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been puzzling over metaphors that involve an action performed on a noun. For example, say he’s writing an essay and suddenly gets some new ideas that inspire him. It’s not literally that he was traveling in a...
Sean in New York City is curious about the expression the business end, as in the business end of a gun. It’s simply “the end of an object that fulfills its function or purpose,” such as the business end of a shovel, the business...
