Susan from Virginia Beach, Virginia, shares the phrase her mother used when the kids refused to eat: It’ll grow hair on your back teeth. This supposed motivator likely blends two older traditions: a German idiom, Haare auf den Zähnen haben...
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...
I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth goes back to the 18th century. The quip appears in Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation, published around 1738, and in the 1811 slang dictionary Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Gail...
Martha and Grant share some favorite unusual words. Omphaloskepsis is a fancy term for “navel-gazing,” from the Greek omphalos, meaning “navel.” Mumbleteenth is a handy substitute when a number is too embarrassing to mention...
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...