If you’re looking for a great book about writing, Martha recommends Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. In it, Constance Hale offers an accessible, bang-up course in writing with excerpted passages that really show how the...
Jay in Fort Worth, Texas, grew up in Wisconsin hearing kibosh as KIB-bosh, not the more common KYE-bosh. To put the kibosh—also spelled kybosh—on something is to stop it decisively and fast; the word has also been used as a verb and even an...
Is it okay to make a verb out of a noun? Yes! It’s estimated that twenty percent of English verbs started as nouns. Just think of the head-to-toe mnemonic: you can head off a problem, face a situation, nose around, shoulder responsibility...
Anthony in Salt Lake City remembers using frajo for a cigarette in high school in Pueblo, Colorado, where it worked as classroom code alongside Spanglish terms like fedia for money. The word turns up in studies of Mexican-American youth slang from...
When a minister asked, “Who gives this woman to be married?” the father regrettably answered, “Her mother and me.” Well, he regretted it after his daughters ribbed him about his improper grammar, specifically, his disregard...
Catherine from Dallas asks about I don’t cotton to, meaning something isn’t to one’s taste or that someone doesn’t get along with it. The expression is often heard as Southern US English, but the verb cotton goes back hundreds of years in England...