A native Japanese speaker is mystified by the expression “happy as a clam.” In Japanese, she says, if you had a good night’s sleep you might say you “slept like a clam” or “slept like mud.” So why do English...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a fill-in-the-blank limerick puzzle, including: “There was once a coed named Clapper / In psychology class quite a napper. / But her Freudian dreams / Were so classic it seems / That now she’s a...
Really??? Really! A college student in Provo, Utah, says he’s hearing this expression of sarcastic incredulity more and more— even catching himself saying this to his cellphone when it dropped a call. He suspects it comes from Saturday Night...
In many neighborhoods, the night before Halloween is the night when pranksters run around wreaking all kinds of mischief–toilet-papering houses, spraying windows with shaving cream, ringing doorbells and then running away. A Connecticut woman...
Is there a word in the English language that means “to read by candlelight”? A listener in Kittery Point, Maine, used to read the dictionary every night as a teenager and came across such a word. She’s been racking her brain to...
Pickle, baboon, cupcake, snorkel, pumpkin, Kalamazoo—let’s face it, some words are just plain funny. But what makes some words funnier than others? Martha and Grant consider this question with an assist from Neil Simon’s play (and movie)...