Brand names, children’s games, and the etiquette of phone conversations. Those clever plastic PEZ dispensers come in all shapes and sizes—but where did the word PEZ come from? The popular candy’s name is the product of wordplay involving the German...
Tokuji Hayakawa was an early-20th-century entrepreneur whose inventions included a mechanical pencil he called the Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil, and later renamed the Ever-Sharp Pencil. Over time his company branched into other types of inventions, and...
A Milwaukee, Wisconsin, listener who heard our conversation about the phrase sharp as a marshmallow sandwich wonders about a similar expression that denotes a person who’s not all that bright: “sharp as a bag of marsh.” Variations of this insult...
Why do we speak of trying to egg on a person, meaning to urge them to do something? Martha explains that the egg in this case has nothing to do with chickens. This kind of “egg” is derives from an old root that means to “urge on with a sharp object...
“He’s sharp as the corner of a round table.” “She’s so sad she’s pulling a face as long as a fiddle.” If startling similes leaving you “grinning like a basket full of possum heads,” you’ll love the book Intensifying Similes in English, published in...
sharp n.— «Knowing whether a line move is due to sharp or public action is important. A sharp is a term used to describe those who make a living off of sports betting. They wager large sums of money at numerous books, in hopes of gaining an edge...