If you’re going to hit the road in a motor home, best to bone up on some of the slang used by RV enthusiasts, like stinky slinky, PUPs, and gassers. A stinky slinky is a sewer hose, a PUP is a pop-up camper, and a gasser is a motor home powered by...
Candace from Memphis, Tennessee, wonders about the phrase You’re eating me out of house and home. The emphatic doublet house and home is part of a long tradition that includes scared out of house and home and chased out of house and home. Even...
Dilly-dally comes from Anglo-French dalier, which means “to chat” or “act playfully,” making it a linguistic relative of dally, “to trifle with” or “to spend time frivolously,” and dalliance, a “frivolous act.” This is part of a complete...
A Wisconsin wonders if anyone outside her family uses the word funsel, possibly spelled funcil, to denote “a single strand of leftover cobweb hanging from the ceiling.” That one may be all their own, but another word she asks about, gnurr, meaning...
The Swedish term hemmablind literally means “home blind,” and refers to that state when you’ve lived in your home so long you no longer notice its flaws or your own clutter. This handy Swedish term is one of several introduced in the reality TV...
Stellar first sentences from Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork (Bookshop|Amazon) about her quest to become a sommelier and from A Tale of Two Cities (Bookshop|Amazon) by Charles Dickens.This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “It Was...
