If something’s clean as a whistle, that doesn’t mean it’s shiny and spotless like a silver whistle in a referee’s mouth. The idiom refers to a whistling sound: That piercing noise is super-bright and finely edged on the ear...
Has ain’t gone out of fashion? Teachers have succeeded in stigmatizing the word, and it’s also not such a common pet peeve any more. But perhaps the biggest reason you don’t hear it as much is because it’s no longer used in...
Is it cool for parents to use their children’s slang? What’s wrong with the term illegal alien? Grant and Martha discuss possible alternatives. Yehudi refers to the mysterious character who holds up strapless dresses, turns the light on...
Nathan in Leesburg, Florida, asks about the phrase suss out after hearing it on a technology podcast in the sense of “investigate.” The verb is spelled suss, and to suss something out means to look into it, work out what is going on, or take a...
A listener has spent the last 30 years looking for the origin of the playful phrase “you’re the berries.” This affectionate expression first appears in literature in the 1908 book Sorrows of a Showgirl, then made its way into...
A new transplant to Dallas wants to assimilate into the Texan way of speaking without offending the locals or forcing any new vocabulary. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Texas Talk” Hi, you have A Way with Words. Good...