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...
A Virginia listener says that often when she’d leave the house, her grandfather would tell her Remember you belong to the land of the blue hen’s chicken. What in the world did that mean? The feisty blue hen is the state bird of Delaware...
Christy in Norfolk, Virginia, shares a funny story about how she and a friend failed to communicate about an invitation. The friend often mentioned that she and some pals were going to a club, assuming that Christy would understand that she was also...
Lorelei from Wakefield, Virginia, learned the word nonce from the Spelling Bee game in The New York Times. When she looked up the definition of nonce, she saw it described as an adjective that is coined for or used for one occasion. She found this...
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead (Bookshop|Amazon) is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (Bookshop|Amazon). Set in Appalachia, it won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When Martha interviewed Kingsolver at...
Is it correct to toast someone with the words Here, here or Hear, hear? It’s Hear, hear, and it’s short for the imperative Hear him, hear him! This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “It’s “Hear, Hear!”...
