In 1894, the U.S. was in an economic depression, an Ohio businessman named Jacob Coxey led a march on Washington to protest national economic policies. This motley crew came to be known as Coxey’s army, and the phrases “enough food to...
Anna in Dallas, Texas, doubts her fiancée Sarah’s family word biffed it, but Sarah has the dictionaries on her side: to biff it can mean to fall, especially in an embarrassing way. Sarah grew up hearing it from her grandmother and aunt, including...
Why is there an upstate New York but not an upstate New Jersey, or an Oklahoma panhandle but not a Missouri panhandle? Both geographic phenomena exist in those places, but the terminology varies. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Most high schoolers hear the bell ring, and they know it’s time for next period. But some students simply refer to each class as first bell, second bell, and so on. What did you call each class period? This is part of a complete episode...
Kevin Whitebaum of Oberlin, Ohio, has a favorite sentence from P.D. James’s A Taste for Death: “The original tenants had been replaced by the transients of the city, the peripatetic young, sharing three to a room; unmarried mothers...
If someone’s a hoopie, it means they’re less than sophisticated. This term was used in the Ohio River Valley to refer to the bumpkins from West Virginia who performed menial work with barrels, hammering their hoops into place. This is...