Stacey from Chelsea, Massachusetts, says her grandfather, a Russian immigrant who grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, used to warn his grandkids with what sounded like Don’t be a come-upper after he’d cleaned the apartment. The...
The word shambles originally referred to an abattoir or butchers’ stalls filled with blood and guts. Over time, this word underwent semantic bleaching, and now simply refers more generally to “a mess.” This is part of a complete...
Josh in Binghamton, New York, wonders about the slang term beefed it, meaning to “took a hard fall.” It’s probably connected to biff, often used in snowboarding and mountain biking, meaning “to fail” or “do badly...
Carriage, cart, wagon, buggy — how do you refer to that giant basket on wheels you push around the grocery store? As the Harvard Dialect Survey shows, the answer depends on what part of the United States you’re from. See the big Facebook...
To spin a brodie or pull a brodie is to spin a doughnut in a car. The term derives from the name of Steve Brodie, who allegedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886. To do a brodie, originally meaning to jump or fall, came to mean any kind of...
An upstate New York woman says her British husband makes fun of her for saying lookit! This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Lookit!” Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, Grant. I’m Susan Moody, and I’m from the...