Jill in Shelton, Washington, says that when she lived in Southern California, she understood the word garbage to mean food scraps, with trash referring to everything else collected curbside. Historically, garbage has referred to the wet, disgusting...
The dated term “jingoism” denotes a kind of belligerent nationalism but the word’s roots lie in an old English drinking-house song that was popular during wartime. Speaking of fightin’ words, the expression “out the side of...
There’s a proverb that goes “beloved children have many names.” At least, that’s true when it comes to the names we give our pets. “Fluffy” becomes “Fluffers” becomes “FluffFace” becomes...
In the 1940s, the noun munge was student slang for crud or filth, then later became a verb denoting the action of messing with data in a way that might produce the equivalent of trash or rubbish. Over time, munge, which was sometimes spelled mung...
In an earlier episode, we talked about plogging and trashercize, those workouts that involve picking up trash while jogging or walking. Jeannie from Port Wing, Wisconsin, wrote to share another fitness gimmick, the bean diet. Just open a bag of...
A Twitter beef between Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa has a listener wondering about the phrase talk out the side of one’s neck, meaning to “talk trash about someone.” It’s simply a variation of talking out of the side of...
