James, an art-supplies dealer in Dallas, shares street-art vocabulary from graffiti culture. A writer is someone who does graffiti, and bombing usually refers to doing illegal graffiti rather than a legal mural, with a finished piece sometimes...
Busman’s holiday is time off spent doing something closely related to one’s work, not necessarily clocking in on a day off. Tracy in Pleasanton, California, remembers using it to describe her father, who worked for TWA at San Francisco airport and...
A listener from Richmond, Virginia, remembers an old game called buckeye that consists of metaphorically pulling someone’s leg, then calling Buckeye! and tugging one’s own lower eyelid. Martha suggests that it may be related to a 19th...
Are we a nosy species? A listener married to a woman from Bangladesh explains how a Bengali term that translates as “nose-going” reflects the naturally inquisitive style of Bangladeshi culture. In many languages, the nose figures...
Grant shares a bit of military humor related to cumshaw, the art of procuring what you need in ingenious ways: “There is only one thief in the army. Everyone else is just trying to get their stuff back.” This is part of a complete...
The Swahili phrase nililala fofofo means “to sleep really well.” Literally, though, it translates as “to sleep like a log.” Are the English and Swahili idioms related? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...