A listener in Virginia Beach, Virginia, reports that her three-year-old would ask for horrible eggs rather than hard boiled eggs, and the family has used that term ever since. A listener in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, says her Cuban-born mother...
Addie in Neenah, Wisconsin, seeks the origin of a word her grandfather used for gunk that gets stuck, such as a bit of food between one’s teeth. The dialectal term is likely ackempucky, which, according to the Dictionary of American Regional...
With your support, 2021 will be a pivotal year for A Way with Words. With your help, and by tightening our budget, through 2019 and 2020, we’ve managed to weather the pandemic while still increasing listenership both on the radio and by...
The expression “to a T” comes from a shortening of tittle, a word meaning a little of something. The word tittle even shows up in the bible. There’s also an idiom “to the teeth,” as in dressed to the teeth, or fully...
When you think about it, the saying “I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth” makes a good deal of sense. It goes all the way back to the 18th century and Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation. This...
If someone’s getting long in the tooth, it means they’re getting old, or too old for their behavior. The metaphor of long teeth comes from horses. If you look at a horse’s teeth and the extent to which their gums have receded, you...