A listener in Colby, Wisconsin, says that growing up, she called a drink with ice cream in root beer a black cow. But when she moved to Wisconsin, she found that the locals called the same beverage a root beer float. The era of drugstore fountains...
A savory Sicilian sausage roll is always a hit for the holidays. This dish goes by a long list of names that are equally delicious to say. Plus, why are those promotional quotes you see on the back of a book called blurbs? The guy who coined the...
Early 20th-century humorist Gelett Burgess is credited with coining the word blurb for “a bit of promotional language,” such as recommendations on a book jacket. To create a buzz for his 1906 book Are You A Bromide?, Burgess devised advertising copy...
Amelia in Traverse City, Michigan, says her grandfather used to pull her close and whisper There are no bones in ice cream. He has a point there, but where did the phrase come from? That phrase seems to have arisen as part of a goofy joke making the...
Sure, it’s scary to send your writing to a literary agent. But pity the poor agent who must wade through hundreds of terrible query letters a week! One of them shares excerpts from those hilariously bad query letters on a blog called SlushPile Hell...
Gelett Burgess famously wrote I never saw a purple cow, but plenty of folks know a purple cow to be a grape soda float. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Purple Cows” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Julianne. Hi...
