Megan from Savannah, Georgia, is curious about a phrase her father used: down cellar behind the axe, a phrase whose meaning she never quite understood. Down cellar, meaning “down in the cellar,” is common in New England and the Canadian Maritimes...
A profile in The New Yorker of writer Patricia Lockwood, author of Will There Ever Be Another You (Bookshop|Amazon) opens by saying she has “the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid,” a description the quirky author herself...
Penny in Savannah, Georgia, recalls that her father, a Navy veteran who served in the South Pacific, would say of someone who was clueless or didn’t know what he was talking about: That person doesn’t know if he’s punched, bored...
The adjectives canine and feline refer to dogs and cats. But how does English address other groups of animals? Plus, cabin fever has been around much longer than the current pandemic. That restless, antsy, stir-crazy feeling goes back to the days...
An industrial-design student in Savannah, Georgia, uses Boolean software for making 3-D renderings. Why Boolean ? The term honors the brilliant autodidact George Boole, who helped pioneer the use of binary computing language and Boolean logic. This...
Logan in Wilmington, North Carolina, says he and his friends have long used scooter-pooting to mean “going around having a good time.” Both scooter-pooting and scooter-tooting are colloquial terms for casual socializing, and are...