Greg in Mena, Arkansas, says that when he was learning to be a professional pilot, one of his instructors would say, You thought like Nelly if someone had thought they were doing something correctly, but failed to. Although the phrase is not that common, there are several similar versions, such as You thought that peanut butter was jelly, and, with varying words of different levels of coarseness, You thought the cat pooped jelly, You thought scat was jelly, or You thought like Nelly, and thought crap was jelly. The saying Greg’s instructor used is likely a clipping of one of these, just as happy as a clam is a shortening of happy as a clam at high tide. This is part of a complete episode.
The so-called “lifestyle influencer accent” you hear in videos on TikTok and YouTube, where someone speaks with rising tones at the end of sentences and phrases, suggesting that they’re about to say something important, is a form of what linguists...
Meg in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, gets why the state highway department encourages drivers to use their blinkers when changing lanes, but placing a digital sign at the Sagamore Bridge that reads Use Ya Blinkah is, well, a lexical bridge too far. Meg’s...
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