The expression to turn on a dime means “to change quickly.” Early on the phrase referred to horses or horse-drawn vehicles and later to motorized ones, and suggested the idea of changing direction quickly and easily without needing a large turning...
A Seattle, Washington, listener wants to know why, when marking time, we say “one Mississippi, two Mississippi,” as opposed to other states or rivers. In the United Kingdom, they’re more likely to say hippopotamus. Some people...
If you’re a parent looking for ways to warn your kids not to play with matches, you could do worse than “If you play with fire, you’ll pee the bed.” Similar admonitions are used around the world, apparently because a child...
Some people proudly embrace the label cancer survivor, while others feel that’s not quite the right word. Is there a better term for someone who’s battled cancer? Writers and listeners share the best sentence they’ve read all day...
A while back, we talked about ishpy, a popular word among Nordic immigrants meaning something that a child shouldn’t touch or put in their mouth. It turns out that lots of listeners with ancestors from Norway and Denmark know the term ishpy...
In an earlier episode, we discussed linguistic false friends, those words in foreign languages that look like familiar English words, but mean something quite different. Martha reads an email response from a listener who learned the hard way that in...
