A listener shares her grandfather’s funny saying. It’s a series of logical statements, but when pronounced very quickly it can sound like some sort of Latin incantation: In mud eels are / In clay none are / In pine tar is / In oak none is. In The...
Trinette in Virginia Beach, Virginia, remembers that growing up in Ascension Parish in southern Louisiana, her family would use the phrases dodo the baby or let’s go dodo. Sometimes spelled dodu, the word dodo meaning “sleep” is commonly used in...
Vivian in San Antonio says when her family returned from a vacation, her dad would announce Home again, home again! Jiggity jig! This saying is actually more than two centuries old, and comes from an old nursery rhyme about farmers going to market...
Language serves as a generational marker, leaving speakers of different ages with mutual misunderstandings of pop culture references and idioms. We look at the historical lack of distinction between the words done and finished, clarify the origins...
Do our toes have names? Mother Goose and Scandinavian nursery rhymes gave us variants of Tom Pumpkin, Long Larkin, Betty Pringle, Johnny Jingle, and Little Dick. Sounds cooler than big toe, no? A whole lot more shared here. This is part of a...
Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game of Name That Nursery Rhyme. The catch is the text has been run through the translation site Babelfish. What happens when Little Bo Peep and Humpty Dumpty go from English to Spanish to Chinese and back again? This...