Barbara from Seattle, Washington, was surprised to hear a friend from Montana use the term jockey box to mean “glove compartment.” Heard in much of the Northwestern United States, jockey box is a relic of the days when the drivers of...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski proffers a puzzle he calls “F-Takeoffs,” which involves removing the initial letter F from a word to get an entirely different word. For example, if John orders some lumberjack tools by sending some scanned...
All writers should heed the advice of Stephen King: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Stephen King Quote for Writers”...
A bartender wonders about the origin of the term jockey box. In his world, a jockey box is a metal container for ice. However, in some parts of the western U.S., a jockey box is the glove compartment of a car, and much earlier, the term referred to...
Is that a winklehawk in your pants? A listener shares this word for those L-shaped rips in your trousers, from an old Dutch term for “a carpenter’s L-shaped tool.” And Grant has a new favorite term, motherwit, meaning “the...
Greetings, all! In our most recent show, we talk about great words for Scrabble, plus "madcap" comedy, mondegreens, "No way, Jose!" "hubba hubba," and the name of that flourish underneath John Hancock's John Hancock...