The documentary The Palindromists includes a scene with author, actor, and devoted palindrome constructor Danica McKellar showing off her favorite reversible creation: Tons of UFO snot. This is part of a complete episode.
The phrase Lead on, Macduff, meaning “Let’s go!” or “You go on ahead and I’ll follow,” is an alteration of the famous phrase from the final scene of combat in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Bookshop|Amazon), where...
Melissa in Grand Prairie, Texas, hails from a family in New Jersey that refers to red pasta sauce with meat in it as gravy. Her family has Italian roots, and in their local dialect, the word for “sauce” can also be translated as...
A ninth-grade English teacher in Canfield, Ohio, says that when her class reached the climactic scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus bends his mighty bow and kills his wife’s suitors, a student wondered whether the correct phrase is shoot a bow...
English rhyming slang had a short run of popularity in the western U.S., thanks in part to Australians who brought it over (and then, again, thanks to a scene in Ocean’s Eleven). But even in the U.K., it’s now mostly defunct. This is part of a...
We’ve previously discussed the term “going commando,” meaning “dressed without underwear.” It first appears in print in 1974, but likely goes back further than that. The scene in a 1996 episode of Friends, wherein Joey...