Names don’t always mean what you think they mean. Main Street in San Francisco is named after businessman Charles Main, and Snowflake, Arizona, honors two guys named Snow and Flake. Plus, big words for small people: A colorful new book introduces...
The word pickle is related to a similar-sounding Dutch word, pekel, meaning “brine.” In the 1400s, a pickle was a spicy sauce. Soon the word came to refer to the salty or acidic used to preserve foods, and later to the foods themselves preserved in...
Would you rather live in a world with no adjectives … or no verbs — and why? Also, who in the world is that director Alan Smithee [SMITH-ee] who made decades’ of crummy films? Turns out that if a movie director has his work wrested away from him and...
A caller in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, says that when his grandfather was asked how he was doing, he’d reply, “running like a pickle seeder,” meaning “doing really well.” The joke, of course, is that there’s no such thing as a pickle seeder. After all...
In Wisconsin, a slippery Jim is a kind of pickle. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Slippery Jims” Grant, another Wisconsin term for you. Do you know what a slippery gem is? A slippery gem? No. Kind of newt? Candy bar? You’re closer...
Do pregnant women enjoy pickles and ice cream? Linguists from the American Dialect Society have been discussing this recently. They found that the expression pickles and ice cream once referred simply to the conjoining of two unrelated things, sort...