Asher in Burlington, Vermont, grew up wondering why his father jokingly called him a little Gomer. The nickname points to Gomer Pyle, the good-hearted goofball from The Andy Griffith Show who later became a U.S. Marine in his own 1960s sitcom. After...
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...
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...
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...
Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? (Or a jaboney, jadroney, jambone, jiboney, gibroni, gibroney, gabroney, jobroni, jobrone, etc.) This playful insult, meaning a “rube” or “loser,” traces 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...
