What do you call a long sandwich filled with lots of ingredients? Whether you call it a sub, a hoagie, a grinder, or something else entirely depends on where you’re from. And: Martha’s visit to an Alaskan reindeer ranch reveals why you...
A listener in Fairbanks, Alaska, says her husband has long referred to her as a whippersnapper, insisting it’s a playful term of endearment. Whippersnapper goes back to the 17th century, when boys who didn’t own horses would strut around...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski pitches a puzzle about the names of minor-league baseball teams. For example, which team’s name might refer either to a type of weather phenomenon or a wooden roller coaster on the Coney Island boardwalk? This is part of...
Noah in Burlington, Vermont, wonders about the catchphrase I’m too cringe for New York, too based for LA. As explained at Know Your Meme, the slang term based is now a positive term popularized by the rapper Lil B, referring to one’s...
Joan from Dallas, Texas, wants to know why some people are judgmental about people who speak with a glottal stop in such words as cattle, bottle, or even glottalitself. She noted a commenter on TikTok criticizing a Scottish woman for pronouncing...
Jonas, a high-school English teacher from Chatham, Virginia, is curious about the word jabroni (also spelled jabroney, jabronie, and jabrony), meaning a “chump” or “palooka.” It may come from a Milanese dialect word, jamboni...