What do you call the end of a loaf of bread? There are lots of terms for that last piece, including heel, bread butt, the outsider, the nose, bunce, tumpee, skalk, krunka, or in Spanish codo, meaning “elbow.” Sue in Singer’s Glen...
Modals are helping verbs that affect a verb’s grammatical mood and express possibility, capability, likelihood, permission, or obligation. The use in the Southern United States of multiple modals, such as might could and might should reflect...
Scott from Valdosta, Georgia, remembers his father using the phrase in a goat house looking for wool referring to “searching in a place where you won’t find what you’re looking for.” This is part of a complete episode...
In Scotland, a fank is a coil of rope or a snare, a sense that gives rise to fankle, meaning to tangle. As a verb, fankle can also mean to lose the thread of a conversation, and as a noun, it can mean the tangle itself. Earbud cords, for example...
In their article “My Mother, Whenever She passed Away, She Had Pneumonia: The History and Functions of whenever,” Michael Montgomery and John Kirk discuss the “punctual” whenever, a vestige of Scots-Irish usage heard in much...
Listeners weigh in on our discussion about thin places, those locales where the mundane and mystical appear to merge. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “More Thin Places” You’re listening to A Way with Words, the...