The origin of “the whole shebang,” meaning “the whole thing,” is somewhat mysterious. It may derive from an Irish word, shabeen, which meant “a disreputable drinking establishment,” then expanded to denote other...
Eddie from Petoskey, Michigan, learned double-talk from his mother, who picked it up from girlfriends in the 1950s or early 1960s. In his family’s version, ib is inserted around each syllable: for a word like cat, it follows the initial consonant...