In China, dogs say wang wang instead of woof woof. Wikipedia has a great list of such cross-linguistic onomatopoeias. Of course, we all know what the fox says. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Dog Says “Wang...
In Indiana, a dish-to-pass supper is another term for a pot-luck supper or a covered-dish supper. A related regional label is the pitch-in supper, where everyone contributes a dish. Checking Wikipedia’s potluck article for more synonyms turned up...
Homie and homeboy don’t come from Latin homo, confirming Rachel in Connecticut’s suspicions about an unsourced Wikipedia claim. The source is the English word home: homeboy goes back to the late 1800s in Black English, meaning a male friend from...
desert cooler n.— Note: Wikipedia has a decent entry for this type of air conditioner. Collins is the only mainstream dictionary publisher to include the term, but does so with an outdated definition: “a cooling device in which air is...
wikigroaning n.— «First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight.” Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very...