When Julie and her sister were growing up in England and their grandmother saw them giggling over something, her grandmother would say You girls would laugh to see a pudding crawl! The phrase suggested that they’d laugh at anything. It evolved...
Linda from Wichita, Kansas, thinks we need a word for that closed-mouth little smile we give to strangers on the street — not a friendly Duchenne smile, just a polite acknowledgment of the other person’s existence. She suggests the word smurm...
Gerald from Gaspee Point, Rhode Island, wants to know the story behind the term dashboard. Originally a dashboard was wood or leather placed at the front in horse-drawn vehicles to keep the driver and passengers from being dashed with mud, water, or...
On our Facebook group, listeners are playfully crowdsourcing what people in different professions might punningly plant. For example, what kind of fruit tree might twins cultivate? What type of flower might be planted by a professional mime? This is...
The phrases Can’t died in the poorhouse, Can’t died in the war, and Can’t died in the cornfield are all jocular ways of encouraging someone to persevere despite difficulties or long odds. Sometimes this notion involves the...
In Scotland, a fank is a coil of rope or a snare, a sense that gives rise to fankle, meaning to tangle. As a verb, fankle can also mean to lose the thread of a conversation, and as a noun, it can mean the tangle itself. Earbud cords, for example...