Annie in Bend, Oregon, says that while living on a narrowboat in England several years ago, she encountered some intriguing slang: clever clogs, a slightly derogatory term for someone who’s a bit too smart for their own good, and pop your...
Suzanne in Williamsburg, Virginia, but grew up in Southern California, where she used the term go-aheads for the rubber-soled shoes that other people call flip-flops or rubber thongs or zoris. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
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...
A woman from Hartford, Connecticut, remembers her mom used the term clackers to denote those floppy, rubber-soled shoes otherwise known as flip-flops, go-aheads, or zoris. Anyone else use clackers in that way? This is part of a complete episode...
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...
What’s the antidote to living in a sound-bite world? How about unwinding with luxuriously expressive prose? Also, the cloak-and-dagger world of editing dictionary entries. Plus, what you might say instead of cursing, and oddball Scrabble words...