Victor, a film noir fan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says closed captioning has made him newly aware of dialogue he’d previously missed. Watching The Maltese Falcon, for example, he ran into the phrase crackin’ foxy. The crack is the same crack as...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
A Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, listener says when he was growing up, his family used the word schmutz as a verb. For example, when one parent reminded the other to apply sunscreen to the youngsters, they might say Make sure you schmutz the kids...
Ben calls from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to say that he and his wife, who is from Germany, were taking a leisurely stroll at Valley Forge. They ended up leaving one of the trails and taking a diagonal route across a field and agreed that in...
Listeners continue to chime in on the topic of funny street names. One of them points out that in Philadelphia, there’s a Rhoads Street and a Street Road. This is part of a complete episode.
If you catch your blue jeans on a nail, you may find yourself with a winklehawk. This term, adapted into English from Dutch, means “an L-shaped tear in a piece of fabric.” And: What’s your relationship with the books on your...
