How did the term Bohemian come to be associated with literary and artistic nonconformists who live outside mainstream society? In the early 19th century, the French term La bohème was applied to the Romani people, also known as the Roma, a...
Michelle in Pembroke Pines, Florida wonders why performers wish each other luck with the admonition Break a leg! This practice of wishing the opposite of what you really mean appears across a wide range of theatrical traditions. German performers...
Bow chicka wow wow is the joking riff that signals a sexual double entendre, and a cleaner echo is brown chicken, brown cow. The phrase mimics the same rhythm and shows up in Trace Adkins’s country song Brown Chicken, Brown Cow, with a video full of...
Where’d we get the term swan song? A caller says this expression came up in conversation just before her retirement and she wonders about its origin. Martha reads email from listeners suggesting alternatives to the word retirement. This is part of a...
ontin n.— «But he also likes to come up with new words to describe cultural patterns, acknowledging that at breakfast he invented a new word—ontin, meaning the ostensible usage of something—which he has already used a few times to much bewilderment...
opera cape n.— «He is genitally intact, a cavalier rather than a roundhead. His johnson wears an opera cape, as they say in US gay circles.» —“Cutting comments: the foreskin debate” by Simon Mills Times (London, United Kingdom) Nov. 4, 2007...