On our Facebook group, listeners are playfully crowdsourcing what people in different professions might punningly plant. For example, what kind of fruit tree might twins cultivate? What type of flower might be planted by a professional mime? This is...
Wayne in Sherman, Texas, wonders how the term pear-shaped came to describe something that’s gone badly. The expression seems to have arisen during Falklands War of the early 1980s. If you need a word for pear-shaped, there’s always pyriform, from...
Alan in Indio heard everything went pear-shaped on MythBusters and wondered why it means that things went wrong. The literal adjective pear-shaped can describe body shape or, in linguistics, vocal production, but the slang failure sense appears in...
shmoo n.— «Yeast cells don’t have casual sex. Preparations are involved. In particular, the cell must reshape itself, becoming elongated like a microscopic pear. Scientists have a name for a cell in such a state: “shmoo.” The word was coined in...
loot in the boot n.— «My shape is that of a slightly distorted heavy pear: slender, Chabella-like shoulders and a gently rising collarbone cast lines that soften and swell past a high waist to what Amy and I refer to as “loot in the boot”—hips that...
