To be on tenterhooks means to wait in anxious suspense, and the phrase is rooted in wool processing. After woven wool was washed to remove oil and dirt, it was stretched on wooden frames called tenters so it would not shrink; the small hooks holding...
Steve from San Diego asks whether workplace support documents should describe repeated problems as recurrences or reoccurrences. Recurrence is the safer, far more common choice in corpora and in many dictionaries, although reoccurrence and reoccur...
At SUNY Potsdam and North Country Public Radio, Grant Barrett collected slang, regionalisms, and family expressions on index cards, about 160 terms in all. Examples include crick, a northern regional pronunciation of creek, and bogue or boag, slang...
Lester in Dallas wonders why colleagues spell holistic as wholistic when they mean looking at a project as a whole. The standard spelling is holistic; the wholistic variant reflects folk etymology, a reshaping based on the tempting but misleading...
Savannah of Washington, D.C., and her South African husband, John, have opposite readings of jacked up: to her, if the D.C. Metro is “jacked up” then it’s messed up; to him, it is impressively “raised up” or better than expected. The phrase is...
The Yiddish word bupkis means nothing, and speakers sometimes split its syllables apart to exaggerate how empty that is. One example from an email in Denton, Texas: “Not only did the government shut down, but the employees are collecting bup and kis...
