New research shows that you may be less influenced by superstitious behavior like walking under ladders or the magic of four-leaf clovers if you’re reading about it in another language. • Sometimes not cursing will catch someone’s ear...
The verb to chork means to make the sound your feet make when your shoes are full of water, such as after misjudging a puddle. The word has been recorded since at least 1721 in a Scottish writer’s description of wet feet after wading through glens...
How do you pronounce the name Carnegie? The Scottish industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie pronounced it with an accent on the second syllable, as his namesake, the Carnegie Corporation of New York takes pains to make clear. Good luck...
Collieshangles is an old Scottish term for a quarrel, possibly deriving from the notion of two collie dogs fighting. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Collieshangles” Another wonderful bit of Victorian slang, a collie...
The books we love as children may influence our careers more than we realize. As a child, Martha was fascinated with stories of cracking codes, and Grant loved books with glossaries–not that far from the kind of work they do today. A caller...
Callum at UC Irvine grew up with baffies, the family word for rounded, heeled morning slippers, and later found that friends didn’t recognize it. The singular is baffy, and in Scotland baff can mean a bedroom slipper. The word came through Callum’s...