Haddie from Houston, Texas, is curious about the phrase as long as Pat stayed in the Army, which applies to something short-lived. The phrase appears in Kentucky newspapers as early as 1898. No one’s sure who Pat was, although perhaps...
When working on a construction site in Kentucky, Te’koa from Norfolk, Virginia, heard someone use the term si-gogglin to describe something that’s “crooked,” or “curvy.” Variants heard primarily in Appalachia...
Michael in Morgantown, Kentucky, is pondering his grandfather’s phrase He fotched a heave and catched a fall meaning someone “made a quick bodily movement and fell.” Fotched is a dialectal past tense of fetch. This is part of a...
Two close friends from Richmond, Kentucky, call to share their hilarious dispute about how to correctly describe the one of them who’s always to blame for something. Is she the fault default or the default fault? This is part of a complete...
When writing his doctoral dissertation, John in Bardstown, Kentucky, used an upside-down question mark after a comment to indicate he was being sarcastic. Is there a punctuation mark that serves this function? Over the centuries, several have been...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...