Rose in Lebanon, Virginia recalls a phrase passed down from her great-grandmother: The night before the first day of school, parents would come into the children’s bedroom and say in a singsong voice: School butter, school butter. This...
Rose works at a trailer shop south central Pennsylvania and often hears her co-workers adding the element -couple to a round number to indicate an indefinite amount, such as “bring me twenty-couple screws,” in the same way that others...
Giving your baby an unusual moniker may seem like a great idea at the time. But what if you have second thoughts? One mother of a newborn had such bad namer’s remorse, she poured out her heart to strangers online. Speaking of mothers and...
The Little House on the Prairie series was actually a collaboration between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who turns out to have been a bit of a bully. This is part of a complete episode.
A Green Bay, Wisconsin, caller is curious about her mother’s playful interjections. If someone said, “Well,” her mother would add, “Well, well. Three holes in the ground.” If someone started a sentence with...
Oh, that gives me agita! A Connecticut native says her Midwestern colleagues office were flabbergasted to encounter this expression, which she’s known all her life. Grant and Martha discuss this word for “upset” and its likely...