Home » Units of time

TagUnits of time

“Tang” Menu Mystery Solved

In a previous episode, we came upon a word mystery in a 1947 menu from Jackson, Mississippi, that mentions tang. The mystery has been solved! It wasn’t the drink, and it wasn’t the fish; it was Cudahy Tang, one of over a hundred knockoff...

Tang as a Main Course

Everyone knows about Tang as that orange kick in a glass, but could it also be an entree? A listener from Plano, Texas, found an elderly relative’s plan for family meals from 1947, which lists “tang with molasses” as a main course...

Lustrum

A decade is ten years. A century is a hundred. But what do you call a period of five years? It’s a lustrum, borrowed whole from Latin. So you might say a decade is two lustra. This is part of a complete episode.

Animal Hybrids Quiz

Greg Pliska, musical director for the Broadway show War Horse and our very own Quiz Guy, has a puzzle about Animal Hybrid Phrases combining two common expressions involving animals. For example, what do you get when stuffed animal stocks go down? A...

Thrice Happy Pair

An Indianapolis listener has a copy of a wedding poem that refers to the thrice-happy pair. Is a thrice-happy pair three times as happy as anyone else? Martha explains that the idea goes all the way back to Roman poetry. Here’s an example from...

Happy Intergalactic Star Wars Day!

Happy Intergalactic Star Wars Day! May the 4th (Be with You)! Did we really just say that? Okay, on to our own latest episode: "Like Death Eating a Cracker" features silly ways to tell time, like Bob o’clock (8:08), Big o’clock...

Recent posts