Following up on conversation about words for weak coffee, Carol in Wilmington, North Carolina reports that her mother-in-law’s term for strong, boiling-hot coffee is punished water. This is part of a complete episode.
Ian in Clyde, North Carolina, is puzzled when a colleague uses the term blue million, meaning “a large amount.” Along with words like zillion and gazillion, this expression functions as an indefinite hyperbolic numeral. Sometimes the...
Do you answer the phone with a word or phrase that’s a little out of the ordinary? Readers of our email newsletter had some surprising answers to that question. One says that just for fun, he likes to answer with a cheery Front desk! A reader...
Why do we say we are going to nuke some food when we’re simply heating it in the microwave? The earliest recorded instance of nuking food in this way comes from a 1982 article in the University of North Carolina student newspaper. It’s...
Diane calls from eastern North Carolina to talk about a phrase her father used if she asked him to repeat something: I never chew my celery twice. He probably conflated the idea of chewing celery with some far more common expressions involving doing...
Jeffrey in New Bern, North Carolina, wonders why we use the phrase right as rain to mean “all satisfactory” or “quite correct.” No one’s sure about the origin of this expression, although it may reflect positive...