Dining on a budget? Just whip up some necessity mess or a potato bargain. That’s a pork, onion, and potato stew popular in Eastern Massachusetts. Or how about some Georgia ice cream? It’s a North Florida term for grits. Martha shares a...
A pitch-in is Indiana’s preferred term for a potluck dinner, as Sabrina learned after moving to Indianapolis from Seattle. When classmates announced a pitch-in, she didn’t know what they meant, and friends from Ohio and family in the South were...
A woman says that when playing hide-and-seek with a small child, her mother-in-law says “peep-eye!” instead of “peekaboo!” Is that usage limited to certain parts of the country? And where do they say “pee-bo!”...
Elizabeth in Princeton, Texas, remembers her late father, who grew up in Snowflake, Arizona, finishing a meal with “I am sufficiently suffonsified. Anything more would be purely obnoxious to my taste. No thank you.” The mock-grand phrase means he...
A caller wonders why his North Carolina-born partner uses the phrase “I’d have liked to” instead of “I almost” or “I nearly,” as in “I’d have liked to died laughing.” This is part of a...
When Megan in San Diego heard her father say he had to park way out in the back forty, he was using a farm expression for land far from the house, road, or main lot. The Dictionary of American Regional English gives back forty as a remote, large...