who laid the rail
adv. phr.— «For all those years I have been loaded for bear with lectures of all sorts and sizes on “Who laid the Rail” to “What the Wild Western Waves are Saying.”» —“Tom Arter’s Lecture” Macon Telegraph (Georgia) May 19, 1890. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A Navy veteran recalls hearing the Southern expression fat lighter from his wife’s family in Troy, Alabama. It denotes an old, resin-rich pine wood that becomes highly flammable as it ages. Fat lighter is prized as kindling and often called fat...
A profile in The New Yorker of writer Patricia Lockwood, author of Will There Ever Be Another You (Bookshop|Amazon) opens by saying she has “the impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid,” a description the quirky author herself...