To give it the old college try means “to put forth one’s best effort.” The phrase stems from the early days of baseball, and arose from tension between the few professional college-educated players and those who’d picked up...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...
High school students in Alabama share some favorite slang terms. If someone tells you to touch grass, they’re telling you to get a reality check — but the last thing you’d actually want to touch is dog water! Also, the history of the...
Mickey from Austin, Texas, is curious about a phrase his mother uses: Are you smelling what I’m stepping in? meaning “Do you understand what I’m saying?” It likely derives from Black English Do you smell me? and Do you feel...
Jonas, a high-school English teacher from Chatham, Virginia, is curious about the word jabroni (also spelled jabroney, jabronie, and jabrony), meaning a “chump” or “palooka.” It may come from a Milanese dialect word, jamboni...
On our Facebook group, listeners are playfully crowdsourcing what people in different professions might punningly plant. For example, what kind of fruit tree might twins cultivate? What type of flower might be planted by a professional mime? This is...