Gabe from Newark and Michigan asks about the fighting challenge “Put up your dukes,” a phrase that treats dukes as fists or hands. A familiar explanation connects it with Cockney rhyming slang: Dukes of York rhymes with fork, once slang for “hand.”...
Elizabeth in Billings, Montana, grew up in Ireland using bollix or bollocks to mean making a mess of things, as in “I’ve really bollocksed this up.” The word is related to balls and originally referred to testicles, which helps explain why a...
A caller from Imperial Beach, California has a punctuation question: Dr. Tei Fu Chen and his wife, Dr. Oi Lin Chen own and operate a large, multinational herbal food company. In company literature, the two doctors are referred to in several ways...
