Sharing a secret language. Did you ever speak in gibberish with a childhood pal, adding extra syllables to words so the adults couldn’t understand what you were saying? Such wordplay isn’t just for kids—and it’s not just limited to...
Cutting a rusty, heard in parts of the U.S. South, means acting up or doing something mildly outrageous, such as pulling a prank or shouting a naughty word. Fawn from Danville, Kentucky, learned it from a sister-in-law from Selma, Alabama. The noun...
If you’re nibbling on slippery Jims or sipping sweet soup, chances are you’re in the Badger State. It’s the language of Wisconsin — explained at last. Also, the famous abolitionist whose name became an exclamation, and how to...
Would you rather live in a world with no adjectives … or no verbs — and why? Also, who in the world is that director Alan Smithee [SMITH-ee] who made decades’ of crummy films? Turns out that if a movie director has his work wrested away...
Jane in Elk Park, North Carolina, grew up hearing her great-uncle say a misbehaving child was cutting a head shine—pulling some caper or carrying on in a noisy, comic way. The expression likely combines shine, used since at least the 1830s for a...
There’s a new kind of hamburger menu that involves pixels, not pickles. It’s that little stack of horizontal lines in the corner of a webpage that you click to see more options. You might use a hamburger menu while webrooming–that...