John in Tucson, Arizona, remembers his grandfather from Sharon, Vermont, saying possessives such as hisn, hern, yourn, and ourn, as in Those cattle are hisn or That house is hern. These archaic forms go back to Middle English, shaped by analogy with...
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
Chuck in Rutland, Vermont, has heard a phrase several times over the years that left him puzzled. If someone announces it’s late and they’re going to bed, and someone else questions that idea, the retiring one observes, Well, it’s...
Hillary in Woodstock, Vermont, grew up saying mayonnaise as MY-oh-nayz, just like her mother did. That pronunciation is real and valid, though uncommon. The French-derived word has never fully anglicized, so dictionaries and dialect surveys record...
Liam in San Francisco, California, emailed to share a passage from Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History (Bookshop|Amazon). It’s a sensuous description of the sights, sounds, and smells of autumn in Vermont. This is part of a complete...
When Sean in New York City contemplated telling his boss he wasn’t coming into work the next day, he texted a friend that he might bang out sick. He wonders about the phrase, which he picked up from his father, a police dispatcher in New York...
