If someone’s unfamiliar to us, why do we say I don’t know him from Adam’s off ox? This phrase is occasionally mistaken as Adam’s all fox. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Know Someone From Adam’s...
Miranda, a nurse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had a patient who described her hospital food as the pits, meaning it wasn’t good. The expressions the pits and in the pits arose out of 1950s college slang, and derive from the notion of smelly...
Thanks to a project led by Professor Charlotte Brewer of Oxford University and research fellow Stephen Turton of Cambridge, you can now enjoy a trove of letters between James Augustus Henry Murray and his many correspondents during his work on what...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski tests our knowledge of Latin by way of brand awareness this week with a game about brands like Lego, which takes its name from Danish “leg godt,” meaning “play well.” As it happens, the Latin term lego...
Hate it when a software upgrade is worse than the previous version? We call that a flupgrade, or a new-coke. As in, “Skype really new-coked it with version 5.3.0.” Come on, Skype! This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
We all know that the color pink is for boys and the color blue is for girls — at least, that’s how it was 100 years ago. Grant and Martha share the surprising history behind the colors we associate with gender. Plus, we go rollin’ in our...