Fret can work transitively in parts of the American South, as in Don’t fret that child, meaning don’t bother or worry them. Angela, originally from North Carolina, asked about the usage at a Dallas event after hearing forms such as Don’t fret him...
Tom in Canton, Texas, remembers fellow high school students in Israel saying in Arabic that they were taking bus number 11, a joking way to mean walking. The image is right there in the numerals: the two straight 1s look like a pair of legs, much...
Victoria from Tallahassee, Florida, weighs in on our discussion about terms for an extremely quick bath. When Victoria was young, her great-great grandmother from Poland, when checking if Victoria had indeed washed herself, would ask...
A Jamaican English word for firefly is often rendered peenie-wallie, with many spellings, including peeni wally. Its origin is unknown. Valerie Bloom’s poem “Two Seasons” uses the word, and an audio reading preserves the sound of it in context. This...
A chance encounter with University of California San Diego professor of history Mark Hanna, author of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, leads to a discussion of how the saying “arrr!” came to be associated with...
A listener in Hope, North Wales, points out that there’s punny way to spell a hungry horse in four letters. (Hint: one particularly British synonym for horse is gee-gee.) This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Hungry Horse...