When Melissa was growing up in Tacoma, Washington, she’d walk to the corner store, where she’d pick up a corn dog and a bag of jo jos, a term for soft potato wedges with the skin left on. Researcher Barry Popik has dug up a story that...
Gwen, a sixth-grader in Rosalia, Washington, wonders why indifferent doesn’t mean simply “not different” or “uniquely different.” Her father’s gloss, “not caring,” is the standard sense: apathetic, unconcerned, or having no preference either way...
Benjamin in Seattle, Washington, says both with a brief L sound, like bolth, a pronunciation his partner noticed before he did. It’s not confined to Northern California, where he grew up, or to the Midwest connection she wondered about. In an online...
A listener in Abilene, Texas, says that his Maryland relatives always referred to asparagus as spagglers, so he was shocked when he got to college and realized no one else knew what he was talking about. This vegetable goes by lots of other names...
A customer-service representative from Seattle, Washington, is curious about the phrases people use as a part of leave-taking when they’re finishing a telephone conversation. Linguists who conduct discourse analysis on such conversations say...
Jordan from Olympia, Washington, asks about oddball school mascots and the origin of the word mascot. Evergreen State College’s Geoduck — a giant clam native to the Pacific Northwest — belongs in the same memorable company as the UC Santa Cruz...