Daniel in Youngstown, Ohio, reports that his grandfather used an odd expression when the whole family left the house: We’re off like a herd of turtles — or a turd of hurtles! The first part of the expression is one of several similarly silly...
Erin in Austin, Texas, asks about at loggerheads, meaning stuck in a stubborn disagreement or being at an impasse. The idiom is about 400 years old and likely draws on more than one sense of loggerhead. One is a log-like head, or blockhead...
“Bott’s dots” are little round pavement markers, named for California highway engineer Elbert D. Botts. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Bott’s Dots” Grant, do you know what bots, dots are...
If someone’s “drunk as Cooter Brown,” they’re pretty darn intoxicated. The saying comes from the word cooter, meaning box turtle, and alludes to a turtle swimming around in its own drink. This is part of a complete episode...
Writers and where they do their best creative work. A new book on Geoffrey Chaucer describes the dark, cramped, smelly room where he wrote his early work. Which raises the question: What kind of space do you need to produce your best writing...
David points out that a turtle tucked away for the winter may not be hibernating in the mammalian sense: reptiles are often said to brumate. The distinction is not universally insisted on, but brumation usually refers to a reptile’s winter dormancy...