Nate in Winterville, North Carolina, remembers an older relative asking Are you going to get outside of that? meaning “Are you going to finish that meal?” To get outside of a meal or to climb outside of a meal suggests that you’re getting the food...
Olivia, a sixth-grader in Somerville, New Jersey, says she and her classmates were flummoxed by a word on their spelling-bee study list: xylyl. It’s a term from chemistry, referring to a group of atoms derived from a liquid called xylene. One source...
Carol from Falmouth, Massachusetts, is curious about this bit of wisdom from her father: As you travel through life, whatever your goal, keep your eye on the doughnut, and not on the hole. The Mayflower Coffee Shop chain, based in New Jersey and New...
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...
President Barack Obama hopes to boost the economy by pouring federal dollars into efforts to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, much like the old Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. But how about reviving that other jobs program from the...
An upstate New York listener of Italian descent is curious about two favorite expressions: “fuggeddabouddit” and “bada-bing, bada-boom.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom” Hello, you have A Way with Words...
