Barb in Boston, Massachusetts, once worked on Wall Street for a British bank that had an office that handled tizzy-hunting, devoted to uncovering scams and fraud. In A Dictionary of the Underworld (Bookshop|Amazon), slang lexicographer Eric Partridge says tizz-worker was a term used in the 1920s to denote a “confidence man,” tizz being is short for tizzle, meaning “swindle” or “fraud.” In old Cockney slang, tizzy, also spelled tizzi, means “sixpence.” This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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