In the 1940s, the slang phrase You shred it, wheat! was used to express complete agreement with something, a punning variation of You said it! The phrase was sometimes also used as a retort meaning “Figure it out yourself.” This is part...
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...
Need a slang term that can replace just about any noun? Try chumpie. If you’re from Philadelphia, you may already know this handy placeholder word. And there’s Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, and … The Bronx — why do we add...
When there’s no evening meal planned at home, what do you call that scramble to cobble together your own dinner? Some people apply acronyms like YOYO — “you’re on your own” — or CORN, for “Clean Out your Refrigerator...
McPaul lives in Montclair, New Jersey, but grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, where several casual restaurants spelled the name of their establishment as dinor rather than diner, as in Stan’s Dinor. This spelling variant is largely limited to...
Margaret from Dallas, Texas, wonders about a word that both her grandfather and mother use: cornswoggled. It means “confused.” Cornswoggled is a variation of hornswoggled or hornswaggled, which originally meant “to be...