Barb in Boston, Massachusetts, once worked on Wall Street for a British bank that had an office that handled tizzy-hunting, devoted to uncovering scams and fraud. In A Dictionary of the Underworld (Bookshop|Amazon), slang lexicographer Eric...
Valerie from Los Angeles, California, is curious about the admonition don’t buy the hype. Don’t buy the hype about the word hyperbole, though, because that’s likely not the source of the word “hype.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you is an English idiom suggesting that the listener is gullible. It’s widespread throughout the United States. On our Facebook group, listeners shared other versions, including one that...
Byron from Norfolk, Virginia, ran across goldbrick in a 1950s military police training film, where it meant someone useless or unreliable. The slang goes back to a 19th-century swindle in which scammers painted lead or other metals gold and sold...
A defective car is a lemon because the fruit’s tartness long suggested sourness and disappointment. Austin from Owensboro, Kentucky, heard a friend use the word for a troublesome minivan. The negative sense of lemon appears by the 1860s for a...
casher n.— «According to the FBI , ATMs from 49 cities were hit—including Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Moscow and Hong Kong.…These people in the photos are believed to be “cashers,” low-level players, in a scheme devised from some...