After our conversation about wishing well eggs, a listener from Viroqua, Wisconsin, chimes in with another name for this egg-in-toast dish: UFOs, short for Unidentified Frying Objects. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “UFOs:...
Jonathan Saha is an associate professor of history at Durham University in England. His latest book is Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Bookshop|Amazon), which chronicles how the lives of animals were irrevocably changed by...
Morgan in San Antonio, Texas, wondered why toasted sounded like a reference to alcohol to some readers of her social media post and marijuana to others. Both readings are possible. Toasted broadly means intoxicated, with context and community...
A 13-year-old from San Diego, California, wonders: Why do we call that breakfast staple toast instead of, say, toasted bread? It’s natural to find shortcuts for such terms; we’ve also shortened pickled cucumbers to just pickles. This is...
Addressing a wedding invitation to Mr. and Mrs. John Smith is pretty old-fashioned. It’s more than appropriate these days to address both a husband and wife by their respective names. But if you’re inviting someone who prefers the old...
Five guys walk into a diner. One orders a toad in the hole, another the gashouse eggs, the third gets eggs in a basket, the next orders a hole in one, and the last fellow gets spit in the ocean. What does each wind up with? The same thing! Although...