Amelia in Arlington, Virginia, was surprised to hear her wife, who is from Iowa, use the phrase getting the goody out to describe someone sporting a well-worn pair of sweatpants, indicating that they were continuing to get the most out of that...
A kindergartener misunderstands the name of an event at his school, insisting to his mother that he attended a pepper alley, not a pep rally. Let’s hope that’s the case, because pepper alley is actually 19th-century boxing slang for...
In 1975, Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Amazon|Bookshop). A few years later, she wrote an essay in The New York Times with advice for writers and artists, calling on them to observe...
You look like the hind wheels of destruction means “You look terrible!” An earlier version is the hind wheels of bad luck. This is part of a complete episode.
Ian in Clyde, North Carolina, is puzzled when a colleague uses the term blue million, meaning “a large amount.” Along with words like zillion and gazillion, this expression functions as an indefinite hyperbolic numeral. Sometimes the...
If you need a way to urge someone to butt out of your business or stop telling you how to do something, you can always retort, I’m the one milking this duck! This is part of a complete episode.