David from Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a former truck driver who remembers that his fellow users of CB radio tended to sound similar, no matter what part of the country they were from. Is there such a thing as an occupational accent? Many of those truck...
When the pressure drops in an airplane cabin and all the oxygen masks fall, pilots refer to all that equipment hanging down as a rubber jungle. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Rubber Jungle Pressure Bundles” The other...
Wayne in Sherman, Texas, wonders how the term pear-shaped came to describe something that’s gone badly. The expression seems to have arisen during the Falklands War of the early 1980s. If you need a word for pear-shaped, there’s always pyriform...
Back in the 1930s, airplane pilots didn’t have sophisticated instruments to tell them which way was up. When flying through clouds, they literally relied on changes in the vibrations in their seat to help them stay on course, flying by the...
