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The Devil’s Daughter is Getting Married

Carlos in Augusta, Kentucky, says that in Cuba, when it was raining while the sun was still shining, he used to hear people say la hija del diablo se está casando, or literally, “the devil’s daughter is getting married.” A friend...

Silver Thaw

In the Eastern and Southern United States, freezing rain that leaves everything covered with ice is simply known as an ice storm. In the Pacific Northwest, this sort of rain followed by a hard freeze goes by a more poetic name: silver thaw. This is...

Episode 1575

Not My Circus

Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...

Mulligrubs and Mulligrubbing

Betsy in Murray, Kentucky, reports that a friend was baffled when Betsy told her Quit your mulligrubbing. She was advising her friend to stop complaining. Since the 16th century, mulligrub meant “a state of depression,” or “a bad...

And You Go And You Go And You Go…

Inspired by our conversation about the language of leave-taking and the Southern expression Y’all come go home with us, Claire in Durham, North Carolina, calls to reminisce about her experience as a teenager in Mexico and the extended good...