A magnificent new book celebrates the richness and diversity of 450 years of written and spoken English in what is now the United States. It’s called The People’s Tongue, and it’s a sumptuous collection of essays, letters, poems...
Daniel in Nicholasville, Kentucky, says his grandfather would warn that if he got in trouble, he’d be in deep yogurt. That’s probably just a euphemism for deep doo-doo, deep foo-foo, or an even stronger epithet piled high. This is part...
A Kentucky listener wonders about the admonition I’m going to cut your water off, which she’s heard from parents disciplining a child, but might also used between adults. The phrase “to cut someone’s water off” has been...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...
Logan in Frankfort, Kentucky, says when he was growing up in the southeastern part of the state, he’d hear people using the word wasper for the insect most people call a wasp. This dialectal variant is common in Appalachia, along with wast and...
When there’s no evening meal planned at home, what do you call that scramble to cobble together your own dinner? Some people apply acronyms like YOYO — “you’re on your own” — or CORN, for “Clean Out your Refrigerator...