I was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. This was a well used phrase whenever it was raining and the sun was shining. I was stationed in Tustin, California. Noone except a couple of guys from Kentucky had heard it. Now I live in Western Kentucky and people look at me with confusi...
To freshen your memory, Uncle Jim was conducting his question bee, people who couldn't tell the truth were paying horrible consequences, and Phil Baker was bringing to the language a phrase, "the $64 question." — The American Legion, May 1949 Quizzes are still popular at school, online...
… Twain couldn’t resist presenting the dark side of life with a light turn of phrase:“If I can’t swear and smoke in Heaven, I won’t stay there long.” In 1985 a newspaper in North Caolina published a profile of actor Roger Durrett who specialized in depicting Twain. Durrett credi...
Mormons feel that they can still use the phrase "virgin birth" because God was an immortal being who had sex with Mary. (He was not a mere mortal man.) This is exactly what Bruce R. McConkie, (a leading LDS theologian who died in 1985) said: "For our present purposes, suffice it...
This problem–resolution phrase, or proto-story as I shall call it, uses language to engage the listener with a dis- crepancy or problem (predator coming) and a suggested action to resolve it (follow me). Perhaps, such signals were initially established among close relatives (e.g., mother...
Now, another much less popular definition for the phrase that was also around at this stage of the game was “to ask a person for something, especially money.” From this, perhaps it was the case that it originally had to do with someone trying to trick you into giving them money, ofte...
Over time, these monomers would "self- organize"—a phrase unfortunately wrought with a collective inability to intelligibly explain relevant biochemical interac- tions to the next generation (myself once a victim and for the time being an ignorant perpetrator)—eventually yielding arguably the most...
Spank is a slang term for (male) masturbation, often used in the phrase spank the monkey, and a bank is a place to store similar items (e.g., blood bank or word bank). As a term, spank bank was popularized in the late 1990s, particularly among young men. In the 1999 film 10 ...
I am sure the word soccer is never used on the terraces in any stadium in the UK, and using the phrase on the terraces will show you for the fool you are. Daven February 10, 2012 4:36 pm @Alan: except for the fact that around that time there were a ridiculous number of popular...
Uncle Sam Only gradually superseded earlier Brother Jonathan (1776), largely through the popularization of the figure by cartoonist... bork Not the first name to be so used: [John Quincy Adams's] printed assault upon Jonathan Russell—who had been so ill-advised...that for many years afterwa...