A listener in Hartland, Vermont, has a 25-year-old African parrot named Trouble, and says he’s often asked about the bird’s vocabulary and how the two of them communicate, which raises the question “What is a word?” Grant...
A caller from Vermont says his Mississippi-born grandfather always called him a pussle-gut and warned him about an unseen wampus cat. The former, also spelled puzzle-gut, means “a fat or pot-bellied person,” with pussle related to pus, as in bodily...
A teacher in Oakley, Vermont, noted a curious construction among his students while teaching in Maine. They would say things like “We’re all going to the party, and so isn’t he” or “I like to play basketball, and so...
A listener in Weathersfield, Vermont, remembers going on car trips as a young child and wondering why, toward the end of the day, her parents would be on the lookout for motels with “bacon seed.” This is part of a complete episode...
Jeffrey Salzberg, a theater lighting designer and college instructor from Essex Junction, Vermont, says that when explaining to students the need to be prepared for any and all possibilities, he invokes Salzberg’s Theory of Pizza: “It is...
Faye in Marshfield, Vermont, grew up hearing sneezing to the truth after someone sneezed, a family expression with Yiddish roots. It comes from גענאָסן צום אמת (often spelled in Latin characters as a phrase rendered as genosn tsum emes and...