Waiting for the other shoe to drop means “anticipating something that has yet to happen.” An old story may explain the origin of this phrase: A man staying in a boarding house is getting ready for bed. He removes one shoe and lets it...
Deb in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, says that when her mother was disappointed or annoyed she’d say Wouldn’t that just cork you? The idea here is that in the same way that a cork that stops up a bottle, an unexpected or irritating event...
Kerry from Omaha, Nebraska, wonders why smack dab means “precisely in the middle.” Long used in Appalachia and the American South to make a term more emphatic, smack also appears in such phrases as right smack now and smack jam and smack...
National Book Award winner Barry Lopez had wise advice for young writers. First, read widely and follow your curiosity. Second, travel or learn a foreign language. And third, find out what you truly believe, because if you’re not writing from...
What kind of book do people ask for most often in prison? Romance novels? No. The Bible? No. The most requested books by far are … dictionaries! A number of volunteer organizations gather and distribute used dictionaries to help inmates with...
The phrase This ain’t my first rodeo, meaning “This isn’t my first time” or “I already have experience with this” goes back at least as far as the 1981 Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest, where Faye Dunaway as Crawford famously declares, Don’t f—...