Fans of the popular British baking show know that you don’t want your many-layered cake to concertina, or “collapse like an accordion.” The verb concertina, in this sense, derives from the name of an accordion-like instrument. This is part of a...
A Minnesota listener wonders about a phrase her father always used: the juice was worth the squeeze, meaning the result was worth the effort. It’s simply a reference to squeezing a piece of fruit for drinking. The musician Lizzo suggests a similar...
A Hollywood entrance, in spelunker slang, is when a cave has a large, epic opening. Burkard Bilger’s epic article in The New Yorker on the world of squeeze freaks and other extreme cavers contains lots of great caving slang. This is part of a...
Yolani from San Diego grew up saying squoze as the past tense of squeeze, as in “I squoze some oranges,” and wants to know whether it’s a real word. The standard form for formal writing and speech is squeezed, but squoze has centuries of dialectal...