A wet dress rehearsal is a run-through of all the processes required before a rocket launch, up until, but not including, liftoff. What makes this simulation wet is that the rocket’s fuel tanks are filled, then drained once the countdown clock...
Jeffrey in New Bern, North Carolina, wonders why we use the phrase right as rain to mean “all satisfactory” or “quite correct.” No one’s sure about the origin of this expression, although it may reflect positive...
You say that it’s raining or it’s cold, but what exactly is it? Sometimes called the weather it or the dummy it, this it in this case is a placeholder that makes sentence work grammatically. This is part of a complete episode.
Particularly in the Southern United States, there are lots of fanciful terms for “a sudden, heavy rain” that involve the downpour’s after-effects. For starters, there’s gully-washer, frog-strangler, toad-strangler, toadfrog...
The threat I’m going to cloud up and rain all over you goes back to at least 1911. This is part of a complete episode.
It’s hard enough to get a new word into the dictionary. But what happens when lawmakers get involved? New Jersey legislators passed a resolution as part of an anti-bullying campaign urging dictionary companies to adopt the word upstander. It...