A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...
If you eat ice cream too quickly, the painful result is called an ice-cream headache, a cold headache, or brain freeze. But if you’d feel better using the medical term for it, it’s another mouthful: sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. This...
Funny cat videos and cute online photos inspire equally adorable slang terms we use to talk about them. • Also, when a salamander is not a salamander, the story of an Italian term for a dish towel used halfway across the world, Bozo buttons...
While compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, lexicographer James Murray exchanged hundreds of letters a week with authors, advisors, and volunteer researchers. A new collection online lets you eavesdrop on discussions about which words should be...
Are the words proctor and proctologist connected? No. The word proctor, as in a university proctor who supervises or monitors students, derives from Latin procurator, from words meaning to “care for” or “advocate for,” from...
Our conversation about the phrase pain in the pinny and its relationship to the word pinafore prompted Susan from Eugene, Oregon, to share a memory of wearing pinnies in gym class. This is part of a complete episode.
