If your last name is Cook or Smith, your ancestors probably worked in those professions. But what if your last name is Pope? Or Abbott? And if you have enough food for Coxey’s army, you have more than enough to go around. The phrase refers to...
Meg says that when she was growing up near Boston, Massachusetts, her dad used to entertain kids with a phrase that sounded like Ish biddly oten doten bobo ba deeten dotten wanotten shhhhh! That’s most likely adapted from a camp song from the...
Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...
Scat singing doesn’t have any relation to scat, as in “excrement.” Musical scat probably derives from the sound of one of the nonsense syllables in such songs. This is part of a complete episode.
What was your favorite camp song? If it sounds like nonsensical scat singing, it may date back to a radio character named Buddy Bear who sang in scat on the Buddy Bear show in the 1940s, “Bobo ske deeton-dotten.” This is part of a complete episode.
If you say to someone the Spanish equivalent of “you’re giving me green gray hairs” (me sacas canas verdes), it means that person is making you angry. In Japan, the phrase that literally translates as “one red dot”...