The word traces denotes the long, thin leather straps that secure a horse to a wagon. The expression to kick over the traces, meaning “to become unruly,” refers to the action of a horse literally kicking over those straps and getting all...
Holiday is an old word for a missed spot while painting or wiping a surface. Kelly from Dallas, Texas, learned it from her father, a 28-year Navy veteran, who would point to a skipped patch on the wall and say, “You’ve got a holiday up there.” The...
If you’re having a particularly tough time, you might say that you’re “having a hard fight with a short stick.” The idea is that if you’re defending yourself with a short stick, you’d be at a disadvantage against...
To encourage diners to dig into a delicious meal, an Italian might say mangia!, a French person bon appetit! and Spaniard would say buen provecho. But English doesn’t seem to have its own phrase that does the job in quite the same way. This is...
The phrase “I don’t know him from Adam” suggests that if the person were standing next to the person in Western tradition thought to be earliest human being, the two would be indistinguishable. The phrase “I don’t know...
Those of us in the United States and Britain may be separated by a common language, but we’re also separated when it comes to how we indicate numbers. A Numberphile video featuring linguist Lynne Murphy explains this in more depth. This is...