You look like the hind wheels of destruction means “You look terrible!” An earlier version is the hind wheels of bad luck. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Hind Wheels of Destruction” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is...
A deckhand on the Lake Champlain ferry in Burlington, Vermont, wonders if there’s a word for those accumulated chunks of ice in the wheel wells of cars. He calls them crusticles, but as we’ve discussed before, they go by lots of names, including...
The Spanish version of being a “fifth wheel” on a date is “toca el violin,” which translates to being the one who plays the violin, as in, they provide the background music. In German, there’s a version that translates to, “useless as a goiter.”...
If you’re single but tagging along on someone else’s date, you might be described as a “fifth wheel,” a term that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s day. Not until much later, after the bicycle had been invented, the term “third wheel” started becoming...
Would you rather live in a world with no adjectives … or no verbs — and why? Also, who in the world is that director Alan Smithee [SMITH-ee] who made decades’ of crummy films? Turns out that if a movie director has his work wrested away from him and...
What do you call the dirty frozen solid pack of brown snow that gets jammed in the wheel of a car in certain parts of the world during winter? Try crud, fenderbergs, carnacles, snow goblins, tire turds, or chunkers. This is part of a complete...

