A sixth-grade teacher from San Antonio, Texas, says he and his students are reading The Lord of the Rings. They’re curious about the words attercop, which means “spider” (and a relative of the word cobweb) and Tomnoddy, which means...
Right off the bat, it’s easy to think of several everyday expressions that derive from America’s pastime–including “right off the bat.” The Dickson Baseball Dictionary catalogues not only those contributions but also...
Something excellent can be said to “tear the rag off the bush,” or “take the rag,” and it likely comes from old Western shooting competitions, where the winner would shoot a rag off a bush. The Oxford English Dictionary shows...
The Blind Tiger was a speakeasy during prohibition, perhaps so named because patrons would hand over money to peek at a fictitious blind animal, but also receive illegal booze as part of the bargain. The terms blind tiger and blind pig eventually...
“Do the needful” is a phrase commonly heard from people in India working in tech support. Though it’s fallen out of fashion in British dialects, it’s still common in India to mean “do what you must.” This is part...
The disgruntled consumer who tweeted “My ‘prize’ in my Cracker Jack box…whoever does quality control needs to get fired” accidentally did something miraculous. This message includes all 26 letters of the alphabet...