Henry James is often credited with the following quotation, or a version of it: Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind. If you’re ever unsure of the provenance of a...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle this week was inspired by the name for that two-way radio, the walkie-talkie. If you named other objects using the same repetitive pattern, you’d refer to a pair of socks as feety-heaties. Following that...
Carol from Clays Ferry, Kentucky, remembers her grandmother’s warning dasn’t, as in “We dasn’t do that,” used in the 1950s to steer a child away from rough raspberry-picking or a furnace chain. Dasn’t is a contraction of dares not or dare not...
Nine-year-old Evie calls from Texas to ask about the origin of the phrase raining cats and dogs. This idiom alludes to the cacophonous nature of a heavy downpour. Around the world, expressions about torrential rain also connote the idea of a noisy...
Rachel in Lexington, Kentucky, says her dad had a ready response whenever someone said they forgot what they were going to say: It must have been a lie. This rejoinder apparently goes back to a joke that’s been around since at least the 1920s...
Tara in Westby, Wisconsin, says her family asks for just a shlook of milk, meaning only a sip or tiny bit more. The word comes from German Schluck, “a swallow,” related to schlucken, “to swallow.” That tracks with her grandmother’s German background...