Cat hair may be something you brush off, but cat hair is also a slang term that means “money.” In the same way, cat beer isn’t alcoholic — some people use cat beer as a joking term for “milk.” And imagine walking on a...
When Therese moved from New England to Petersburg, Alaska, she heard a rich mixture of language that arose from the Tlingit people who live there part of the year, the Norwegians who immigrated there, and a thriving fishing industry. So you might...
Julie in Nantucket, Massachussetts, was tickled when her father used the expression weak as hen turd tea. More commonly called chicken poop tea, or chicken poo tea, or in Australia chook poo tea, hen turd tea is a mixture of poultry manure steeped...
Agathism is the doctrine that all things ultimately tend toward good, even though the means by which that happens may be evil or unpleasant or unfortunate. The word comes from Greek agathos, meaning good, which is also the source of...
Where would you find a sports commentator talking about high cheese and ducks on a pond? Here’s a hint: both terms are part of what makes America’s pastime so colorful. • A government official in New Zealand proposes a new, more...
Kid cheater and child cheater are synonyms for spatula, because when you’re baking a cake, a spatula is so efficient for removing the remnants of a sweet mixture from a bowl that there’s little left for a kid to lick off. This is part of...