Chelsea from Louisville, Kentucky, is having a debate with her husband about how to pronounce antenna. She’s from Chicago, Illinois, and he’s from Louisville. She pronounces the second syllable to sound like the word ten, while he pronounces that...
Do you refer to nighttime sleepwear as jammies, jommies, or something else? A Nashville, Tennessee, woman says that her family referred to pajamas as jommies, while her husband’s family always called them jammies. Although jammies is the far more...
Rob and Andrea in Wilmington, Delaware, ask about a word they associate with southern West Virginia. It’s a word for something you “put on” bad behavior to shut it down, and it sounds like it’d be spelled something like quieenus. Their word is...
Kerry from Omaha, Nebraska, wonders why smack dab means “precisely in the middle.” Long used in Appalachia and the American South to make a term more emphatic, smack also appears in such phrases as right smack now and smack jam and smack...
Rose in Edmonton, Kentucky, notes that many people in her area pronounce the word idea as if it were ideal. That’s a common dialectal feature in the Southern United States, as well as Appalachia and the Mid-Atlantic. In parts of New England...
Eric in Tucson, Arizona, hears He’s walking in tall cotton from his wife and wonders what it means. The phrase means things are going well. Tall cotton signals a bumper cotton crop, so farmers who found themselves in it could expect a...