Hannah from Shreveport, Louisiana, is curious about Cooter Brown, a name she’s often heard applied to someone behaving mischievously. Cooter Brown shows up in several expressions, including drunk as Cooter Brown, high as Cooter Brown, and fast...
Fans of The Great British Bake Off (known in the U.S. as The Great British Baking Show because of a trademark issue) know that you don’t want your baked goods to be stodgy or claggy. The verb to stodge, meaning “to stuff,” goes...
This week’s puzzle from Quiz Guy John Chaneski requires coming up with a four-word phrase that contains the words with the in the middle. For example, if the clues are “A person who behaves in a way that indicates romantic interest” and...
In the early 1600s, the term undertaker didn’t necessarily denote someone in charge of arranging funerals. It was a more general term referring to entrepreneurs who undertook the work of running a business. Mine undertakers undertook exploring...
While vacationing on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, a listener encountered an Australian who used the term skylarking to mean “horsing around.” The verb to skylark goes back hundreds of years and once referred to racing through the...
A Michigan biologist wonders how the Carp River in his home state got its name, considering that the river was so named long before that particular fish was introduced. I turns out, just as in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, Europeans who...