A man from Fort Smith, Arkansas, says his Canadian wife is baffled by his pronouncing the word cement as CEE-ment. Stressing the first syllable of such words as police, insurance, umbrella, and vehicle is an occasional feature of Southerners’...
A woman in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says that when her mother was indicating that two things were roughly equal, she’s say they were six and one half dozen of the other. The more common version is six of one and half a dozen of the other or six...
A woman and her 10-year-old daughter are looking for a word that describes being excited but anxious. It’s not exactly twitterpated, and the Southernismlike a worm in hot ashes is vivid, but a phrase and not a single word. If a single word for...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle features variations on the phrase lawyer up, in which the answers are a verb followed by the word up. For example, if someone’s in his car and trying to change gears, but getting a little verklempt about...
A grandmother in Ferndale, California, wonders about a phrase her own grandmother used. If one of the grandchildren walked into a room and joined a conversation already taking place, she’d exclaim, “Oh! Another country heard from!”...
Why are psychiatrists and psychologists called shrinks? It’s a jocular reference to the ritual practice in certain tribal societies of literally shrinking the heads of one’s vanquished enemies. The term shrink was adopted as a joking...