Keith in Valparaiso, Indiana, wonders why his mother uses the term icebox for what other people call a refrigerator. Before electric refrigeration, people kept food cold by putting it in a an insulated box that was literally cooled with a block of ice delivered by the local iceman. This is part of a complete episode.
After an international team of scientists and staffers spent six months at a research station in Antarctica, their accents changed ever so slightly, according to an acoustic analysis by German researchers. The slang terms they shared include dingle...
Is the booty as in shake your booty related to a pirate’s booty? The booty that means “derriere” is an alteration of botty, which is itself an alteration of bottom. The booty that means “loot” or “plunder”...
In the movie “The Changeling” a few years ago, Angelina Jolie’s character tells her young son that if he’s hungry when he gets home there’s milk and a sandwich in the fridge. If I’d been on the set I would have made them stop and change the line; no single working mother in 1928 would have had a Frigidaire (the source of the slang term “fridge”) and she should have told him to find his snack in the icebox.
(Later in the same movie, a policeman refers to a “serial killer”, a term that would have been unfamiliar for about forty years after the scene takes place. And you’d think the director, Clint Eastwood, would have known better, because the term became public in the very case that “Dirty Harry” was based upon.)