If someone urges you to spill the tea, they probably don’t want you tipping over a hot beverage. Originally, the tea here was the letter T, as in “truth.” To spill the T means to “pass along truthful information.” Plus...
Novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince were very different types of artists, but they also had a lot in common. A new book chronicling their extraordinary careers becomes a larger meditation on perfectionism and creativity itself. Plus...
Author Nick Hornby is an ardent fan of both the novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince. In Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius (Bookshop|Amazon), Hornby shows that those two very different men actually had a lot in common...
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...
Alvin in Huntsville, Alabama, is a fan of the multipurpose noun chumpie, which he learned from a native Philadelphian. He remembers hearing it on the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, when actor Will Smith, who is originally from...
Jonathan, who lives in Dallas, Texas, is originally from Prince Edward Island, Canada, where he often heard the phrase fill your boots, an injunction that means “help yourself.” Variants include dig in and fill your boots, eat up and...