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 1950s...
Flee Fly Flo is a camp song, and like other songs passed along orally, it has lots of variations, and often includes rhythmic hand-clapping. In her book Camp Songs, Folk Songs, Patricia Averill suggests the roots of this camp favorite may be in scat...
Giving your baby an unusual moniker may seem like a great idea at the time. But what if you have second thoughts? One mother of a newborn had such bad namer’s remorse, she poured out her heart to strangers online. Speaking of mothers and daughters:...
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. Transcript of “Musical Scat” Hello, you have A Way...
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” refers metaphorically to “the lone...
