A savory Sicilian sausage roll is always a hit for the holidays. This dish goes by a long list of names that are equally delicious to say. Plus, why are those promotional quotes you see on the back of a book called blurbs? The guy who coined the...
Early 20th-century humorist Gelett Burgess is credited with coining the word blurb for “a bit of promotional language,” such as recommendations on a book jacket. To create a buzz for his 1906 book Are You A Bromide?, Burgess devised...
Gelett Burgess famously wrote I never saw a purple cow, but plenty of folks know a purple cow to be a grape soda float. This is part of a complete episode.
In Mandarin Chinese, if you’re “big red and big purple,” it means you’re “famous and popular.” This is part of a complete episode.
A woman in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, remembers a ditty she learned from her mother about “thirty purple birds,” but with a distinctive pronunciation that sounds more like “Toidy poipel blackbirds / Sittin’ on a coibstone /...
roast n.— «In musicians’ parlance, a “roast” refers to a particularly challenging gig. I am currently stuck in snowy Gatwick awaiting a plane to the Matterhorn, on the way to a prog-rock roast presided over by the...