Lucy in Louisa, Virginia, recalls that if her mother was exasperated when the kids were misbehaving, she’d announce I’m going to put you both in a wet paper bag and see who falls out first! This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Rose in Lebanon, Virginia recalls a phrase passed down from her great-grandmother: The night before the first day of school, parents would come into the children’s bedroom and say in a singsong voice: School butter, school butter. This...
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson has been credited with the first use of belittled in print. The word appears in his 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Belittled and Jefferson” As far...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
The expression you look like death eating on a Nab means “you look terrible.” It’s a humorous elaboration of the idea of death, which refers to death consuming a dry, salty, peanut-butter-filled snack made by the Nabisco company...
A physician in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, shares some of the vocabulary of his patients from Appalachia. There, a misery is anything painful, such as a misery in my jaw if they have a painful tooth or a misery in my back if they have lumbar pain...