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Pale as a Haint

Ashley in Danville, Kentucky, says that if she’s looking pale or wan, her mother will say You look like a haint. The dialectal term haint is used throughout much of the American South to mean “ghost” or “evil spirit”...

Lush Desert Islands

Many desert islands don’t look like a desert at all. They’re lush and green. That’s because the term reflects the old sense of desert meaning “wild and uninhabited.” This is part of a complete episode.

Pole-Splitting Superstition

It’s a common superstition: do not split a pole. That is, if two people are walking down the street, they shouldn’t each walk around a different side of a lamppost, telephone pole, or mailbox. But if they do, there’s a remedy: just...

Recurrence vs. Reoccurrence

Which is the better term, recurrence or reoccurrence? A look at the corpus of American literature confirms that recurrence is far and away the more commonly used word denoting “something that occurs more than once.” This is part of a...