Hannah in Denver teaches at a Jewish high school with students from several countries, and many of them write by school or by someone’s house where standard formal English expects at school or at someone’s house. Prepositions rarely match neatly...
Dave Wilton’s wordorigins.org notes two Yiddish words with first citations from 1937 in the Oxford English Dictionary: bupkes, meaning nothing, and zaftig, also spelled zoftig, meaning big, plump, soft, or juicy. Bupkes may originally have referred...
Why do auctioneers talk so fast? Martha and Grant discuss the rapid-fire speech of auctioneers, and how it gets you to bid higher. Also, why so many books have ridiculously long titles, where you’d have sonker for dessert, and an appreciation...
Cara, a real-estate lawyer in Rhode Island, was surprised by gazump, meaning to cheat a home buyer at the last minute, often by raising the price just before the contract is signed. The word turns up in the United States in the 1920s, apparently...
On the menu: necessity mess, potato bargain, and other tasty regional foods that won’t break the bank. Plus, what’s a doomaflatchie? And what do you have to do before you rest on your laurels? Grant and Martha share idioms, proverbs, and...
Did you miss our recent brand-new episode in which we talked about the game rock-paper-scissors, Band-Aids vs. plasters, Yiddish proverbs, jonesing, and more? Listen to it on our website or download the MP3. We aired a rebroadcast last weekend...