Mark in Long Beach, California, was considering hell for leather as a racing-team name. The phrase means going recklessly at full speed, but its origin is uncertain. A traditional explanation points to a rough horseback ride, with saddle, reins, or...
A Las Vegas, Nevada, listener says her South Dakota-born mother always refers to supper as the last meal of the day and dinner as the largest meal of the day. It’s caused some confusion in the family. Linguist Bert Vaux has produced dialect...
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...
The long popular and newly legal-to-sing “Happy Birthday to You” has always been ripe for lyrical variations, particularly at the end of the song. Some add a “cha cha cha” or “forever more on Channel 4,” but a...
“If you come to a fork in the road… take it!” Baseball legend Yogi Berra was famous for such head-scratching observations. What most people don’t realize, though, is that the former Yankees star often wasn’t the first...
The idiom “two heads are better than one” doesn’t exist in quite the same form in Spanish, but there is a variation that translates to, “four eyes are better than two.” In Hungarian, there’s a phrase that’s...
