Long before Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the Little House on the Prairie (Bookshop|Amazon), she worked as a journalist, chronicling life in the Ozarks. In one of her early writings, Wilder refers to what she calls “the famous question”: How old is...
A Kentuckian says he always described gunning a car’s engine to make the vehicle spin in a circle as cutting doughnuts or cutting donuts, but when visiting South Dakota, he heard the same thing described as spinning cookies. This pastime goes by...
The Rockefeller State Park Preserve near Pleasantville, New York, features a fine example of a glacial erratic, a giant rock left behind thousands of years ago by a glacier as it moved. In this case, the word erratic functions as a noun. Both the...
Polly from Issaquah, Washington, grew up in Washington, D.C., where she and her family used the term food store to mean “grocery store.” However, a friend from the Midwest teases her about this. Does anyone else call a grocery store a food store...
A listener notes that among the many Italian-Americans in Rome, New York, the term mappine is commonly used for dish towel. In some some dialects of Italy, particularly the Piedmont and Neapolitan regions, the word mappina means cloth or towel or...
The Italian-American slang word skutch refers to someone who’s being annoying and derives from the Italian word scocciare, which means “to pester.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Italian-American “Skutch”” Hello, you have A Way...