If you’re coming to the lick log or bringing someone to the lick log, you’re getting to a crucial point in negotiations. A lick log is a salt lick being a place where a cattle or other herd animals congregates. This is part of a complete episode...
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. The more common...
A professor who spent 25 years studying arthropods has some thoughts regarding our conversation about the phrase tight as a tick. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Technical Tick Tweak” You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show...
A French idiom that means “to sleep in” or “lie around lazily in bed after waking” is faire la grasse matinée, literally to “make the fat morning.” If you fall in love easily, you’re said to have un coeur d’artichaut, or “an artichoke heart.” That...
Crossword puzzles are great mental exercise, partly because they’re less about how much you know and more about whether you can think creatively about what you already know. For example, what’s the three-letter answer to the clue It has a certain...
What happens when you de-pluralize a book title? As members of our Facebook group discovered, if you make the plurals in the name of a book singular, you can come up with some interesting plot lines. For example, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of...