A Burlington, Vermont, listener says that when he was a boy, his dad used to call him a “little Gomer.” It’s a reference to the 1960’s sitcom “Gomer Pyle,” which featured a bumbling but good-hearted U.S. Marine from the fictional town of Mayberry...
A caller in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, says that when his grandfather was asked how he was doing, he’d reply, “running like a pickle seeder,” meaning “doing really well.” The joke, of course, is that there’s no such thing as a pickle seeder. After all...
If someone’s a hoopie, it means they’re less than sophisticated. This term was used in the Ohio River Valley to refer to the bumpkins from West Virginia who performed menial work with barrels, hammering their hoops into place. This is part of a...
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-century use of...
Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? (Or a jaboney, jadroney, jambone, jiboney, gibroni, gibroney, gabroney, jobroni, jobrone, etc.) Grant traces this playful insult, meaning a “rube” or “loser,” to the 1920s, when Italian...
Rube Goldberg n.— «Rube Goldberg. Automatic machine; probably derived from this well known cartoonist’s humorous drawings of intricate but useless machinery.» —“Machinists” by Mendelowitz Lexicon of Trade Jargon , 1938-39. (source: Double-Tongued...