A listener shares a funny childhood misunderstanding: Her four-year-old kept referring to something in the have-in-it. It took a while before she realized the word he meant was cabinet. The family got such a kick out of the boy’s logic that...
A retired astronomer in Tucson, Arizona, is curious about the expression What are the odds? The idea of odds meaning “the likelihood of something occurring,” goes back to the idea of odds and evens and something odd being the thing...
You’re probably aware that massive is simply a slang term for great or large. But for one professional balloon artist who thought that something massive has to contain actual mass, it took some convincing for him to accept that his giant...
Young women used to be warned that a lady’s name should appear in the newspaper only three times: at her birth, upon her marriage, and at her death. In much the same way, the admonition “Don’t get your name all up in the...
A 1904 dialect collection tipped us off to this variation on the idea of going to the land of milk and honey: “Going to find the honey spring and the flitter tree,” flitter being a variant of fritter, as in something fried and delicious...
To be on tenterhooks, meaning to wait anxiously for something, comes from the tenterhooks on frames used for stretching out wool after it’s washed. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Tenterhooks” Grant, the other day I...