Happy Intergalactic Star Wars Day! May the 4th (Be with You)! Did we really just say that? Okay, on to our own latest episode: "Like Death Eating a Cracker" features silly ways to tell time, like Bob o’clock (8:08), Big o’clock...
A caller from Princeton, Texas, remembers that after a satisfying meal, her late father used to push back from the table and say, “I am sufficiently suffonsified. Anything more would be purely obnoxious to my taste. No thank you.” What...
This week, we’re going through the e-mail bag. Here’s a savory, sensuous one. It’s from Stacey in Boulder, Colorado.
fannings n.pl.— Note: Likely related to the sense of “fan” which means “to winnow; to separate chaff from wheat,” derived from the noun for the device used in such a technique. «After the tea leaves are taken off...
Time to solve another linguistic mystery. You’re in a restaurant. You overhear a conversation at the next table. The woman says to her friend, “You know, I just love the taste of joe floggers.” And her dining companion replies...
This past weekend on "A Way with Words," we mulled over whether part of the recession-busting bailouts the government is proposing should be targeted at reviving the Federal Writers' Project of the 1930s. Get a taste of that, and...