Martha recommends The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Bookshop|Amazon) by Katie Mack, an assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State University. It’s a challenging read, but accessible enough to lay readers to provide...
Kathy in Jacksonville, North Carolina, likes to urge her kids to go outside and play, but is searching for a word or phrase that denotes “the out of doors” without referencing an edifice. Some possibilities: al fresco from Italian, for...
An artist asks strangers to write haiku about the pandemic and gets back poetic, poignant glimpses of life under lockdown. Plus, the new book Queenspotting features the colorful language of beekeeping! Bees tell each other about a good source of...
A North Carolina listener wonders about her mother’s comment in response to complaining or pestering: Go dry up and bust! Since the mid-1800s, the slang phrase Dry up! has meant Stop talking! In the theater world, the term dry up can mean to...
Evelyn in Wilmington, North Carolina, says that when she and her older sister were sassy to their parents, her mother would say either You’re getting too big for your britches or I’m going to bring you down a buttonhole lower. The former...
Calisa in Wilmington, North Carolina, wonders about the origin of the term fair to middling, meaning “about average.” It derives from an old system of classifying agricultural products. This is part of a complete episode.