PS: Thanks to everyone who pointed out that Knucklehead Smiff was a puppet created by ventroloquist Paul Winchell. During World War II, the word knucklehead was popularized by a cartoon featuring Cadet RF Knucklehead, known for setting a comically bad example of things pilots shouldn’t do. It’s a mild insult, and as with blockhead and bonehead, it suggests that someone’s head is so full of blocks, bones, or knuckles that there’s no room for brains. Joan from McKinney, Texas, wonders about the origin of the disparaging term knucklehead. In Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library ( Bookshop| Amazon), University of Virginia associate professor of English Andrew Stauffer chronicles a project to uncover and catalogue the “shadow archive” of history hidden in such volumes. In the process, they risk losing the record of individual reader’s annotations and inscriptions. Increasingly, libraries must decide which of these books to clear out and digitize to make room for more. In the 19th century, books were especially popular gifts - cheap enough to be owned by the middle class, but enough of an investment that people kept them for decades, then passed them down to the next generation or donated them to libraries. Logan in Wilmington, North Carolina, says he and his friends have long used scooter-pooting to mean “going around having a good time.” Both scooter-pooting and scooter-tooting are colloquial terms for casual socializing, and are widespread, although heard primarily in the southern United States. ( Bookshop| Amazon) Too Clever by Halfīhavika in San Diego, California, was intrigued to hear an English speaker use the phrase too clever by half meaning “a little too smart for one’s own good” or “more clever than prudent.” There’s a similar phrase in her native Gujarati that translates as “one and a half times clever.” Scooter Poot and Scooter Toot It’s written by Stef Wade and illustrated by Jorge Martin. Q and U Call It Quits is a funny story about the chaos that ensues for the rest of the alphabet when those two letters quarrel. A new children’s book seems to have been written just for her. In a previous episode, five-year-old Quinn asked why the letter Q is so often followed by the letter U. This dialectal difference figures in one of a fantastic story involving forensic linguistics. Terry, a native of Akron, Ohio, is curious why it seems no one outside of his hometown uses the term devil strip to mean “the narrow band of grass between sidewalk and street.” Devil strip was formerly used this way in a few other cities, but is now heard almost exclusively in Akron, Ohio. For example, what’s the answer if the clues are “part of a football game” and the letters T I, followed by two blank spaces? Devil Strip Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s puzzle has a visual element. Bet Bet BetĪnna in Bellingham, Washington, is puzzled by her younger roommates’ use of the expression bet to “sure,” “okay,” “yes,” “cool.” This slang has been around for at least 30 years and is sometimes expanded to bet bet or even bet bet bet and is probably derived from expressions like you bet. Having reached the age of 82, Mary prefers to call herself middle old. Less successful euphemisms proposed for describing older people include vintage and perennial. In the 1930s, a politician helped popularize the expression senior citizen as a more appealing term than elderly. Mary in Alexandria, Virginia, wonders when words like senior and senior citizen came to mean “elderly.” Senior comes from Latin senex, “old,” the source also of Senate and senile. Banana bus is another bit of jargon for this situation, because the buses are all in a bunch. Public transportation professionals have a term for this - several, in fact: bus bunching, clumping, convoying, piggybacking, or platooning. Finally, two or three buses show up at once, all headed for the same destination.
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