Alan in Columbia, South Carolina, grew up hearing his grandparents ask who wanted to go juking, meaning to ride around, shop a little, eat something, and hang out with no fixed plan. That family use is a tamer cousin of juke or jook, the word behind...
Connie in Santee, California, is curious about a term she read in Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed history of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, The Warmth of Other Suns (Bookshop|Amazon). A shotgun house is a narrow house, the width...
The term palaver, meaning an idle or prolonged discussion, comes from the old Portuguese term palavra that British sailors picked up at West African ports in the 1700s, where palaver huts are places where villagers can gather to discuss local...
