Who is Cooter Brown? And just how high is he? His name appears in lots of phrases, including “high as Cooter Brown,” “drunk as Cooter Brown,” “dead as Cooter Brown,” “fast as Cooter Brown,” and “fertile as Cooter Brown.” The earliest known...
This week: whether cotton-pickin’ is racist, unintentionally funny headlines, whether enormity can simply mean “enormous,” how a person can be “such a pill,” and pandiculation. “It’s good stuff, Maynard...
Helen in Las Vegas, originally from Glasgow, grew up saying she had taken the scunner to someone when a crush suddenly curdled into disgust, irritation, and even a little fear. As a noun, scunner can mean revulsion or loathing, and a miserable...
Vicki in Appleton, Wisconsin, grew up outside Minneapolis using kype (also rendered as cipe or kipe) for taking something that wasn’t really yours but didn’t seem important to the adults in charge, such as fort-building materials, with the...
If you want to claim something—say, the front seat of a car or the last piece of cake—what do you say? Dibs? Boney? How about “I hosey that!”? The hosts talk about this New England expression, its possible origins, and its equivalent in...
“He’s been sick three days hand-running.” Huh? In some parts of the country, “hand running” means “in succession, consecutively.” The hosts muse about the possible origins of this phrase. This is part of a...