Miranda, a nurse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had a patient who described her hospital food as the pits, meaning it wasn’t good. The expressions the pits and in the pits arose out of 1950s college slang, and derive from the notion of smelly...
A taciturn gumshoe in Robert B. Parker’s detective novel Bye Bye Baby (Bookshop|Amazon) offers this good advice: “Never say anything that doesn’t improve the silence.” This is part of a complete episode.
“Mnemonic,” a poem by Brian Bilston, cleverly sums up what many of us feel about the month of January. It’s included in his latest book, Days Like These: An Alternative Guide to the Year in 366 Poems (Bookshop|Amazon), and shared...
Nikki in Northampton, Massachusetts, disagrees with her teenage daughter about the word beef, as in to have a beef, meaning “to have a problem with someone or something.” Nikki uses the word a before the word beef, but her daughter omits...
To give it the old college try means “to put forth one’s best effort.” The phrase stems from the early days of baseball, and arose from tension between the few professional college-educated players and those who’d picked up...
Poet Brian Bilston’s “Index of Discarded First Lines” leaves so much intriguingly unsaid, and if nothing else, offers great possibilities for writing prompts. This is part of a complete episode.