If you’re a parent looking for ways to warn your kids not to play with matches, you could do worse than “If you play with fire, you’ll pee the bed.” Similar admonitions are used around the world, apparently because a child can far better relate to...
Did you know reading poetry improves your prose? That includes hip-hop lyrics, too. Also, how linguist can guess where you come from based on how you speak. What do you call someone who picks the chocolate out of the trail mix? Plus, champing at...
You’re in a business meeting. Is it bad manners to take out your phone to send or read a text? A new study suggests that how you feel about mid-meeting texting differs depending on your age and sex. Grant and Martha offer book recommendations for...
The word doppich means “clumsy or awkward,” is used primarily in Southeastern and South Central Pennsylvannia, and goes back to a German word for the same. Another handy word with Pennsylvania Dutch roots: grex, also spelled krex, meaning “to...
It’s hard to hold a baby when he’s rutching around. Rutching, or rutsching, which means slipping, sliding, and squirming around, comes from German, and is used in the United States in with a Pennsylvania Dutch history. This is part of a complete...
What crawled over your liver? This Pennsylvania Dutch idiom means “What’s the matter with you?” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Pennsylvania Dutch Saying” Here is something that we haven’t really talked about, Martha. It’s the...
