A Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, listener has been pondering the saying It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and specifically whether she uses it correctly. The expression usually appears as It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, means that...
Morgan from Los Angeles, California, has always used dingy (pronounced with a hard G, like dinghy) to describe that woozy, muddle-headed feeling that comes with being sick, a sense she picked up from her mother. Standard dictionaries offer entries...
Do you refer to your dog or cat as “somebody”? As in: When you love somebody that much, you don’t mind if they slobber. In other words, is your pet a somebody or a something? Also, for centuries, there was little consistency in the way many English...
Sure, there’s winter, spring, summer, and fall. But the seasons in between have even more poetic names. In Alaska, greenup describes a sudden, dramatic burst of green after a long, dark winter. And there are many, many terms for a cold snap that...
Liam from San Francisco, California, is wondering about woo-woo. How did this term come to be an adjective describing beliefs or practices considered unscientific or irrational? Woo-woo likely imitates otherworldly sounds or ghostly moans. This is...
Jiffy from Atlanta, Georgia, relates a story about a smelly road trip cooped up with her dog Moxie, who’s been sprayed the night before by a skunk. In recounting the story, she realized she hadn’t used the word skunked since she played cribbage with...
