Why do we have piggy banks instead of any other kind of farm animal banks? In Scotland and Northern England, a kind of Middle Ages earthenware container called pygg. Today we fill our piggs, or piggy banks, with coins. This is part of a complete...
A Northern California caller discovers that in Britain, an invitation to share a joint doesn’t mean what it does back home. This is part of a complete episode.
A Dallas listener is struck by the fact that Texans talk about East Texas, North Texas, South Texas, and West Texas. So why, she wonders, do people in other states say things like Southern Indiana and Northern California? This is part of a complete...
buzzworm n.— «Being in the sun, perhaps the bike path was too warm for this 30-inch buzzworm, a pit viper species common to California and known to biologists and Latin scholars as Crotalus viridis oreganos, or Northern Pacific...
Those who commute coast-to-coast are bicoastals. But what do you call someone who commutes along the same coast—between, say, Miami and New York? A woman who now travels regularly between Northern and Southern California to visit the grandchildren...
milly n.— «In good old Northern Ireland (that’s Norn Iron in the local accent…beautiful, isn’t it?) we call “chavs’”spides,” and female versions are called “millies,” which makes it quite amusing when...